Innovation in Language Learning

This study describes how non-native consonant clusters are realized by Italian leaners of French L2. In particular, it aims at describing articulatorily the coordination across successive consonant gesture to understand which strategies are at play when learners produce non-native clusters. A detailed articulatory investigation of L2 productions is performed here thanks to electromagnetic articulography (AG500), a technology that allows a precise tracking of position and movement of tongue, lips and jaw during speech.

The attention is focused on the production of sibilant clusters since they are phonotactically marked in Italian (Muliačić, 1973), while in French are frequent so much so that place assimilations occur (Niebuhr et al. 2008). Sibilant clusters were studied across words into a carrier phrase at different speech rate (normal/fast) as a faster rate can facilitate coproduction (Byrd & Tan, 1996). Three Italian leaners and two French speakers took part in the study. Articulatory and acoustic data were collected simultaneously and a series of measurements were performed to assess how the tongue an lip gestures are coordinated.

The auditory analysis reveal that at normal rate, all speakers insert a vowel. At faster rate, Italian learners keep inserting a vowel showing a low degree of coarticulation, while the French speakers show a higher degree of coarticulation, confirming place assimilations. On acoustic level, learner’s productions show a dichotomic result (vowel segment between consonants/no segment). On articulatory level, learners’ productions reveal a greater variability of articulatory strategies, having clearly an impact on the speech output, due to their attempts to produce non-native clusters. Speech gesture tracking data suggest that the inserted vowel results from the failure in reaching a felicitous coordination between gestures (in line with Davidson, Stone 2003), while schwa insertion by French speakers seems to be due to a transitional passage from C1 to C2 (Rialland, 1986).

These results highlight how it is important not only to learn to produce correctly a segment but also to concatenate it with other segments. The electromagnetic articulography, capturing tongue/lip movement and position, is crucial for investigating these features of L2 speakers’ production. Not surprisingly it can also offer a real-time visual feedback for improving pronunciation (Suemitsu et al. 2015).