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French liaison is a type of external sandhi involving the use of a special consonant-final allomorph before vowel-initial words. Consonants occurring at the end of these allomorphs are challenging for phonological theory because of evidence that their prosodic and segmental realization is intermediate between the realizations of word-final and word-initial consonants. This puzzling behavior of French liaison has been used to motivate new phonological and lexical representations, including floating consonants, lexical constructions and gradient symbolic representations. This paper proposes an alternative analysis: the variable realization of liaison is derived as a paradigm uniformity effect, assuming traditional phonological and lexical representations. In a Word1-Word2 sequence, the liaison consonant at the boundary between the two words ends up acquiring properties of both word-final and word-initial consonants because of a pressure to make contextual variants of Word1 and Word2 similar to their citation forms. The proposal is implemented in a probabilistic constraint-based grammar including paradigm uniformity constraints and is shown to account for the intermediate behavior of liaison both in terms of prosodic attachment and segmental realization. The paper provides evidence for two key predictions of this analysis, using judgment data on the prosodic attachment of liaison consonants in European French and phonetic data on the interaction between liaison and affrication in Quebec French.
French liaison is a type of external sandhi involving the use of a special consonant-final allomorph before vowel-initial words. Consonants occurring at the end of these allomorphs are challenging for phonological theory because of evidence that their prosodic and segmental realization is intermediate between the realizations of word-final and word-initial consonants. This puzzling behavior of French liaison has been used to motivate new phonological and lexical representations, including floating consonants, lexical constructions and gradient symbolic representations. This paper proposes an alternative analysis: the variable realization of liaison is derived as a paradigm uniformity effect, assuming traditional phonological and lexical representations. In a Word1-Word2 sequence, the liaison consonant at the boundary between the two words ends up acquiring properties of both word-final and word-initial consonants because of a pressure to make contextual variants of Word1 and Word2 similar to their citation forms. The proposal is implemented in a probabilistic constraint-based grammar including paradigm uniformity constraints and is shown to account for the intermediate behavior of liaison both in terms of prosodic attachment and segmental realization. The paper provides evidence for two key predictions of this analysis, using judgment data on the prosodic attachment of liaison consonants in European French and phonetic data on the interaction between liaison and affrication in Quebec French.
French plural markers and German noun capitalization encode syntactic information. Both syntactic markers present the syntactic information needed reliably and saliently, and both are unrelated to phonology. A main difference between both is that French plural spelling is part of inflection morphology and encodes the plural morphemes in written French. German noun capitalization is not a morpheme or a grapheme, but an allograph licensed in a particular function of the sentence, the head of the NP. Although both are substantially different, studies have shown that syntactic training is effective at improving the spelling of these syntactic markers. The current study presents two intervention studies in Grade 4 (N = 176) to examine whether learners who become literate in German and French benefit from a syntactic training in French plural spelling and German noun capitalization. All participants were trained in both languages and tested at four test points. Instruction was provided through learner videos (10 × 10 minutes) shown in a classroom setting. In both languages, the main goal of the training was to raise awareness of the syntactic unit of the NP as well as the syntactic information encoded in spelling. The results show large, short-term and long-term effects of the French training. However, unlike in previous studies, no training effects were found in German when compared with the control group. The paper discusses the results with a focus on the detailed comparison of French plural spelling and German noun capitalization as well as the feedback of the participating teachers in order to provide hypothetical explanations of the mixed training results. The discussed findings have an impact on the conception of syntactic spelling, as well as its teaching and learning.
This study examined the effect of written input on the production of word-final vowels (oral: /i/, /e/; nasal: /ɑ̃/, /ɔ̃/) by 100 native Moroccan learners of French as a second language, relying on a pretest/posttest paradigm. During pretest, participants performed a word repetition task. Then, participants were assigned to five experimental (training) conditions, varying in the modality of stimulus presentation (oral vs. written) and in the modality of response (oral vs. written), before their oral production of the word-final vowels was evaluated in the posttest. Results clearly showed that posttest pronunciation accuracy was affected by the presence of orthographic information in the training task. The copy training task was the most efficient at improving posttest accuracy. Results indicate that orthography, and more specifically the written production copy task, helps L2 learners’ pronunciation more efficiently than phonetic correction.
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