The effectiveness of embodied prosodic training in L2 accentedness and vowel accuracy

Abstract

This study explores the effects of embodied prosodic training on the production of non-native French front rounded vowels (i.e. /y, ø, œ/) and the overall pronunciation proficiency. Fifty-seven Catalan learners of French practiced pronunciation in one of two conditions: one group observed hand gestures embodying prosodic features of the sentences they were listening to, while the other group did not see any such gestures. The learning outcome was assessed in a pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest through a dialogue-reading task and a sentence imitation task in terms of accentedness, comprehensibility and fluency scores, and through formant analysis of participant-produced target vowels. The results showed that compared to non-embodied training, embodied prosodic training yielded continuous improvement in accentedness in both tasks and improved the F2 values of French front rounded vowels (more fronted). As for comprehensibility and fluency scores, both groups showed similar levels of significant improvement. This study highlights the interaction between prosodic and segmental features of speech by showing that training with embodied prosodic features benefitted accentedness and the production accuracy of non-native vowels.

An Open CAPT System for Prosody Practice: Practical Steps towards Multilingual Setup

“…A central influence on target language pronunciation is the primary language of the learner, which in most cases is the mother tongue or first language (L1) (Li et al 2022;Ueyama and Li 2020). Given the significant impact that the prosodic features may have on the prosody of the target language, it seems prudent to take this into account in any feedback system.…”

The Effects of Cross-Language Differences on Bilingual Production and/or Perception of Sentence-Level Intonation

“…Finally, several of the papers included here remind us of the importance of looking at the interaction between prosody and other components of grammar. This is a point that has theoretical (see Feldhausen et al 2021) and pedagogical implications, since research is starting to show how instruction and training focused on prosody can facilitate the learning of other aspects, such as segmental accuracy (as shown in Dahmen et al, but see also Li et al 2022).…”