La prosodie des mots grammaticaux : le cas des deux déterminants "du" et "deux"
Takeki Kamiyama.

Does explicit knowledge of prosody help L2 learners to identify the two determiners "du" and "deux" in French? An analysis of 162 sentences read by 3 French native speakers show the expected tendency of F0 and duration ("deux" being longer and higher than the function word "du"). Then, 3 sets of 8 synthesised stimuli were generated using Mbrola, with expected and unexpected f0 and duration patterns. A perception experiment with 16 French native speakers suggests that they tend to be biased by the unexpected prosody (duration, in particular) when they listen to the sentences with white noise. In another experiment, three groups of Japanese-speaking learners were asked to identify the two words in 48 sentences read by a native speaker. The preliminary results suggest that teaching explicit knowledge of prosody might facilitate the acquisition.