Prosody and head gestures as markers of information status in French as a native and foreign language

Abstract

Prosody and gesture are known as two possible cues to express information structure in a native language. Applying this potentially multimodal form-meaning relation to a foreign language may be difficult for learners. The present study investigates how native speakers and language learners use prosodic prominence and head gestures to distinguish distinct levels of givenness. Twenty-five Catalan learners of French and 19 French native speakers were video recorded during a short narrative task. The recordings were annotated in terms of information status, pitch accents, perceived prominence, and head gesture types. Results show that as a multimodal cue, head gestures merely support pitch accents, which were the most common markers of information status. Furthermore, both native and non-native French speakers perceived new and accessible information as more prominent than given information and more frequently marked the former with pitch accents alone or with a combination of pitch accents and head gestures. Somewhat surprisingly, this outcome resembles the distribution in West Germanic languages. Nevertheless, we found a slightly more differentiated use of accent types in native French, whereas Catalan learners of French made less clear distinctions between information status levels, for example by marking given information by accents to a larger extent.