A crosslinguistic and acquisitional perspective on intonational rises in French

This study compares rising contours produced in the context of contrastive topics by French natives and by low and high proficient learners of French with German as mother tongue. Results show a systematic pattern for French natives who mostly produced a final rise LH*, and hardly ever a bridge accent on the whole phrase. Our results on French natives seem to support earlier claims that tonal patterns with late dip alignments may be recruited for encoding contrast meaning. Results on French learners show a development in the acquisition of the prosody-semantics mapping principles (shifting the accent position from the phrase-initial mon to the phrase-final image) and, not surprisingly, differences in the phonetic implementation of the final rises. Crucially, the impact of phonological and phonetic transfer is more complex than expected: text-to-tune associations are not easy to reprogramme when a new accent location has to be learnt. However, once the phonology is learnt, the phonetic implementation starts being problematic.