Second language acquisition (SLA) research is rich in possibilities for examining language-specific phonetics and phonology in the cross-linguistic context of acquisition. However, much of the existing English-Spanish research focuses on the acquisition of voice onset time (VOT) of /p, t, k, b, d, ɡ/ or rhotics, or on acquisition in relation to factors such as task type, time abroad, and motivational intensity (e.g. Alvord & Christiansen, 2012; Díaz-Campos, 2004, 2006; Face, 2006; Martinsen, 2010; Martinsen & Alvord, 2012; Shively, 2008; Shively & Cohen, 2008; Tanner, 2012 a, 2012b; Zampini, 1994). Like these studies, the present study incorporates linguistic and extralinguistic variables, but this time focusing on Spanish /l/ acquisition in native English speakers. Furthermore, the present study investigates L2 lateral liquid /l/ acquisition by comparing L2 results with previously established L1 research of /l/. Reviewing a variety of SLA phonological research in a wide range of contexts, I include in this study nine independent variables based on syllabic context, phonetic context, level of learning, task type, and motivational intensity. The L2 Spanish /l/ data came from digitally recorded speech samples from 21 L2 Spanish speakers and were compared with a benchmark established by similar recordings from two L1 English and two L1 Spanish speakers. All participated in conversational and reading tasks, and all the L2 participants completed a background questionnaire for demographic and linguistic experience data and the Survey of Motivational Intensity (Gardner, 1985) to measure individual motivational intensities to learn Spanish. From these data, target-like /l/ acquisition was determined by acoustically derived formant measurements and tested for significance in a variety of variables. Of the independent variables, syllabic context proved to be collinear with vowels preceding and following /l/ and motivational intensity was not statistically significant. Moreover, the results prove that syllabic context, certain preceding and following phonetic segments, level of learning, and task type all have a significant effect on successful L2 Spanish /l/ acquisition.

The body of the literature examining the acquisition of Spanish rhotics is expanding (e.g., Canfield, 1940; Face, 2006; Rose, 2010; Hurtado & Estrada, 2010). Most studies on the acquisition of Spanish rhotics have focused on how students progress at different levels of instruction (e.g., Rose, 2010; Hurtado & Estrada, 2010) while various other factors have been shown to affect the second language acquisition of phonology, such as style variation (e.g., Diaz-Campos, 2006; González--Bueno, 1997; Zampini, 1994), L1 transfer (e.g., Major, 2001), and experience abroad (e.g., Díaz-Campos, 2004, 2006; Lafford, 2006). Work on the acquisition of the Spanish tap and trill by regular classroom students has consistently shown that these sounds, especially the trill, are difficult to master for adult English speaking learners (e.g., Reeder, 1998; Face, 2006). However, the influence of factors such as cultural sensitivity, motivation, and experience abroad has been relatively understudied. This study explores the influence of these factors on the second language acquisition of the pronunciation of Spanish rhotics. In order to investigate the acquisition of Spanish pronunciation, 39 adult learners of various levels of instruction participated in the study. Participants completed a background questionnaire, the Survey of Motivational Intensity (Gardner 1985), and the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) as a measure of cultural sensitivity. Learners' speech was recorded as they completed three different tasks, including a brief oral interview, the reading of a story, and a world list including rhotics in six different phonetic contexts that students were asked to read aloud. The tasks were recorded digitally and production of the tap and trill was analyzed spectrographically using Praat. Finally, the relationship between the aforementioned factors and target-like production of /ɾ/ and /r/ was explored with a crosstab analysis combined with an ANOVA analysis and a multiple regression analysis. The results show that neither Motivational Intensity nor Cultural Sensitivity have an influence in the acquisition of Spanish rhotics. Level of instruction and time of residence are the main predictors of target like pronunciation of the Spanish rhotics. The phonetic context harder to acquire is the trill after an alveolar consonant while the easiest is the tap between vowels.

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<p dir="ltr">Bilingualism is defined as the regular use of two or more languages by a single speaker in their everyday lives (Grosjean, 2008). Prior research at the phonetic level has shown that bilinguals often experience a degree of cross-linguistic interference, in which the productions of one language shift in the direction of the opposite language. Evidence for cross-linguistic interference is most notable in contexts where bilinguals activate both of their languages, as in cases of code-switching. Yet prior research has produced somewhat mixed results, with a subset of studies failing to find evidence of cross-linguistic interference. While some authors have suggested that such mixed results may be the result of varying levels of phonetic awareness (i.e., knowledge about the phonetic norms of each language), the potential contribution of this variable has yet to be systematically explored. Utilizing code-switching as a tool, the current study examined the role of phonetic awareness in modulating bilingual cross-linguistic phonetic interaction. A total of 20 L1 Mandarin–L2 English bilinguals were recruited for a lab-based speech production paradigm. English vowel /æ/, which differs acoustically in the vowel height (F1) and vowel backness (F2) from its Mandarin counterpart /e/, was selected as the measure of the phonetic interference. Participants produced stimuli across six contexts: monolingual Mandarin, code-switched Mandarin, pre-switched Mandarin, monolingual English, code-switched English, and pre-switched English. Phonetic awareness was assessed using the Strategies for Pronunciation Improvement (SPI) Inventory (Sardegna et al., 2018). The expected evidence of cross-linguistic interference was not found, and phonetic awareness did not serve to modulate the degree of cross-linguistic interference. The discussion considers whether the lack of convergence in the code-switching context may result from both sociolinguistic and cognitive factors and discusses how this finding can affect the exploration of phonetic awareness in cross-linguistic interference.</p>

published_or_final_version / Humanities / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

漢字對於拼音語言背景的華語學習者而言，一直是較難掌握的內容，他們在初學華語的階段，很快就需要記認與書寫與母語文字系統差異極大的漢字，所以經常遇到困難。正由於缺乏相關背景知識，華語學習者的漢字識別和心理認知歷程必然與母語者有所差異。然而語言離不開書寫與閱讀，若要增進中文能力，就必須提升本身的字彙量。漢字總數以形聲字數量最多，形聲字主要可以拆解為聲旁及義旁兩個部分，功能上多以表音及表義區分。關於母語學童的識字研究，常以「聲旁一致性」作為討論主題，透過唸名作業探討學童的識字過程，學者發現這種中文的形音對應關係是隨著學習歷程發展出來的，年級越高的學童，越能看到顯著效果，與識字量和閱讀能力的關聯密不可分。至於成人華語學習者，是否也能在學習經驗中累積出這種形音一致性的對應概念，是以往較少細究的內容。本論文關注此一議題，進行記錄眼動的心理學實驗，探討形音一致性高低對不同程度華語學習者在辨識單字的處理效率和其背後的認知意義。 　　論文實驗採用漢字聽讀整合的作業形式，請受試者聽取經由耳機播放的語音訊息，在電腦螢幕上點選對應的字形，藉由眼動儀器的記錄，分析眼睛對於目標字和無關字的凝視比例變化。實驗操弄目標字的聲旁一致性，並依照中文能力將受試者分成高、低程度二組，高程度組12人，低程度組10人。除了聽讀作業以外，另外採用語言水平問卷、漢字學習策略問卷、中文年級認字量表以及短文閱讀的眼動實驗做為額外的評量工具，以量測受試者主觀和客觀判斷的中文程度，提供後文討論對外漢字教學的實際建議。 　　實驗結果顯示中文能力高低與聲旁一致性高低對凝視比例具有影響。高程度組呈現預期的聲旁一致性效果，於目標字語音播放後的300至500毫秒之間呈現顯著差異，高一致目標字的凝視比例顯著高於低一致目標字。這個結果表示隨著學習經驗的積累，即使是拼音文字背景的學習者，也會因為識字量增加而逐漸具備形聲字聲旁一致性的認知能力。低程度組雖然未獲得如預期的一致性效果，但卻發現聲旁結合度效果，受試者對於同一聲旁越多的字，其凝視比率高於同一聲旁較少的字，足見低程度組雖然字彙量遠不如高程度組，但已經掌握部分漢字結構表徵，只是更加仰賴字形訊息，所以聲旁結合度影響較大。本文結果顯示，對拼音語言的華語學習者而言，形聲字的辨認也並非絕對的一字一音，而是受到語音成分介入。本文最後提出如何利用此研究結果於對外漢字教學及教材編製上，以供後續教學研究參考。 / Learning to read and write Chinese characters is hard for CFL (Chinese as a foreign language) students, especially for those whose native languages are alphabetic languages, would face to a totally different writing system-“Hanzi” at the beginning stage of learning; therefore, it would be a real challenge because of the complexity. Due to lack of background knowledge, CFL students may have a different cognitive process from Chinese native speakers. Nevertheless, to improve language skills and abilities, it is necessary to raise the amount of their Chinese lexicon. Phonetic compounds comprise most of the Chinese characters and can be divided into two parts-a phonetic radical and a semantic radical, which denote the character’s possible pronunciation and meaning. Researchers have found that “phonetic consistency” affects the latency of naming from Chinese native speakers. For elementary school children, the higher grade they are in, the consistency effect is more significant, which related to their learning process of word-recognition. As for CFL learners, we know few from them. The present study focuses on the topic of phonetic consistency, manipulating the eye-tracking methods to investigate the processing efficiency and cognitive meanings from CFL learners of two different levels. The study utilized visual world paradigm of eye tracking methods through a reading and listening task. Subjects would hear a sentence and would be asked to choose the target character from the four on the screen. Fixation proportions of target and unrelated characters were counted in each time bin. The experiment manipulated phonetic consistency value and two groups of subjects participated in this research: the high level group (12 people) and the low level group (10 people), whose native languages were all alphabetic languages. Except for the listening and reading task, we used questionnaires, character recognition test and reading comprehension test to judge subjects’ Chinese reading ability. Results showed that Chinese ability and phonetic consistency affected fixation proportions. For the high level group, the proportion of target was higher in high consistency condition than the low consistency condition after the target onset. Significant consistency effect was found between 300 milliseconds and 500 milliseconds as expectation. For the low level group, there were opposite results compared with high level group and tended to show “phonetic combinability effect” between 300 milliseconds and 500 milliseconds. Subjects had more fixations on those characters with the amount of the same phonetic radicals. It seemed that the visual information attracted more than sound information. These results implicated that CFL students with alphabetic language background have accumulated the phonetic consistency concepts of Chinese phonograms after years of learning; in other words, the phonetic information of Chinese characters also involved in the word-recognition processing for CFL students. At the end, we provided some advices for teaching Chinese as a foreign language based on the present findings.

The aim of this research is to study the French language used in Belgium, to describe the linguistic situation and some peculiarities of the language there, and to compare it with French language used in France. The author lived in Belgium for nearly six years and compared her experience of the differences between the French language in Belgium with the one used in France. To explore her impressions, she has studied and analysed different sources on the topic and summarised the most important differences. The research is divided in two parts. One gives more general information on Belgium, describes the history of the territory and the linguistic situation of the country to help understand the situation of the French language there. The other, more important part on the language itself describes the phonetic, morphological, syntactic and lexical particularities of Belgian French. The basic conclusion of this paper is that Belgian French is slightly different from French used in France but the differences are not great enough to make understanding between the two nations difficult.

De récentes découvertes sur le rôle du détail phonétique ont inspiré des modèles prosodiques basés sur une approche exemplariste. Au travers de quatre expériences portant sur la production et la perception du détail mélodique et temporel dans la variété napolitaine de l'italien, nous montrons que la notion de détail prosodique n'est pas non plus incompatible avec une approche abstractionniste. Plus particulièrement, nous suggérons que l'exploration du détail prosodique permettrait de mieux encadrer les rapports entre substance phonétique et formes phonologiques, en éclairant ainsi comment les fonctions pragmatiques sont véhiculée par la prosodie. / Recent findings on phonetic detail have been taken as supporting exemplar-based approaches to prosody. Through four experiments on both production and perception of both melodic and temporal detail in Neapolitan Italian, we show that prosodic detail is not incompatible with abstractionist approaches either. Specifically, we suggest that the exploration of prosodic detail leads to a refined understanding of the relationships between the richly specified and continuous varying phonetic information on one side, and coarse phonologically structured contrasts on the other, thus offering in-sights on how pragmatic information is conveyed by prosody.

[pt] Este estudo focaliza a aquisição do aspecto verbal no português, no contexto de uma teoria da aquisição da linguagem que visa a caracterizar o modo como a criança percebe informação gramaticalmente relevante, visível nas interfaces fônica e semântica da língua com os sistemas perceptual/articulatório e conceputual/intencional, respectivamente, a partir do início do segundo ano de vida. A dissertação baseia-se nos pressupostos do Programa Minimalista (Chomsky, 1995; 1999) e numa proposta teórica que visa a uma articulação entre teoria lingüística e psicolingüística no estudo da aquisição da linguagem (Corrêa, 2005a; 2006). A hipótese de trabalho é a de que a criança reconhece aspecto como um traço formal da língua inicialmente a partir de variações morfofonológicas na classe fechada dos afixos verbais, em termos de formas marcadas e não marcadas, ainda de maneira indissociada da informação pertinente a tempo, e que distinções relativas a perfectividade são posteriormente estabelecidas com base no processamento na interface semântica. Investiga-se em que medida informação referente a traços semânticos da raiz verbal concernentes a aspecto lexical (como telicidade, por exemplo) interage com a informação relativa a perfectividade proveniente de variações na forma dos afixos verbais. Com este fim, uma metodologia experimental é desenvolvida, com vistas a dissociar a percepção de informação proveniente das interfaces fônica e semântica relativa a tempo/aspecto. Explora-se o paradigma da detecção de novidade, tradicionalmente utilizado no estudo do desenvolvimento conceptual não-lingüístico, na percepção de informação fônica (formas marcadas de tempo/aspecto como novidade) e conceptual (evento concluído como novidade). Um experimento-piloto, conduzido com crianças de 18-28 meses, é relatado. Um segundo experimento, com crianças de 3 e 5 anos, conduzido com a técnica da manipulação de brinquedos, é reportado, no qual telicidade e perfectividade são variáveis manipuladas. Os resultados são discutidos com relação à metodologia para o estudo do processamento na interface semântica, e em relação a dados da produção de distinções aspectuais na fala espontânea de crianças e hipóteses correntes na literatura em aquisição da linguagem quanto ao papel de informação semântica no estabelecimento de distinções gramaticais. / [en] This study focuses on the acquisition of verbal aspect in Portuguese, in the context of theory of language acquisition that aims at characterizing the way children perceive grammatically relevant information at the interface levels between language and articulatory/phonetic and conceptual/intentional systems - phonetic and semantic interfaces, respectively. It is based on the assumptions of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995; 1999) and on a theoretical approach to language acquisition requiring articulation between a linguistic model of language and psycholinguistic models of language processing (Corrêa, 2005a; 2006). The working hypothesis is that the child initially recognizes aspect as a formal feature on the basis of morphophonological variations in the closed class of verbal affixes (marked vs. unmarked forms), when tense and aspect are undissociated. Distinctions concerning perfectivity would be established later on, on the basis of processing at the semantic interface. The extent to which information pertaining to semantic features of the verbal root (such as telicity) interacts with information concerning perfectivity provided by variation in the form of verbal affixes is considered. An experimental methodology is developed, which is intended to enable the perception of information concerning tense/aspect from the phonetic and the semantic interfaces to be dissociated. The novelty detection paradigm, traditionally used in the study of conceptual development, was explored here so that novelty could be detected both in the perception of the form of affixes and in the perception of a visually presented event. A pilot- experiment conducted with 18- 28 month old children is reported. An acting-out experiment, conducted with 3-5 year olds, is also presented, in which telecity and perfectivity were the independent variables. Questions concerning methodology for the study of processing at the semantic interface are considered, and the results are discussed in relation to children´s spontaneous production data regarding aspectual contrasts and current hypotheses on the role of semantic information in the establishment of grammatical distinctions.