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Communication dans un congrès Année : 2022

A comprehensive corpus of French by Mandarin L2 learners: focus on variation across different speaking styles

Résumé

Just as for native speakers, the pronunciation of foreign or second language (L2) learners varies according to different speaking styles [1]. In this study, we present a corpus that serves as a diagnostic basis for an on-going pronunciation training program targeted at Mandarin learners of French and aim to characterize the Mandarin L2 accent in French at the segmental and pitch levels. More than 38000 vowels (excluding voiceless segments) extracted from 6h30' recording composed of isolated word (1h), text reading (4h) as well as spontaneous speech (1h30) of 20 Mandarin learners were analysed. The results will be compared to a parallel corpus of 10 French native speakers from the Parisian region which contains approximately 21000 vowels across the three different speech tasks and is in the process of being analysed. All the data were processed with the help of the LIMSI forced alignment system [2], and the acoustic vowel parameters were extracted with Praat [3]. The present contribution focuses on the production of oral vowels. Overall, the female learners showed a general "centralization" of the formants in the acoustic F1-F2 space as vowel duration decreased to around 50ms. A one-way ANOVA shows that the differences of F2 values between /u, o, ɔ/ were not significant in the production of text reading and spontaneous speech, but significant in that of isolated words. The mid-vowels /oe, ø/ seemed to be difficult for Mandarin learners in general and were not differentiated in any of the first three formants. When realized in isolated words, the vowel /i/ in the glide context /ɥi/ approached /y/, especially for the segments shorter than 100ms. The tendency of /ɥi/ being substituted by /y/ is also seen in text reading and spontaneous speech. While the comparison to the native corpus will allow us to determine in detail to what extent the learners' pronunciation is less accurate in connected speech than in the word-isolated context, and at faster speaking rates than at lower ones, the present data suggest that different speaking styles should be included in the segmental pronunciation training program.
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Dates et versions

halshs-03984400, version 1 (12-02-2023)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-03984400 , version 1

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Wenxun Fu, Martine Adda-Decker, Barbara Kühnert. A comprehensive corpus of French by Mandarin L2 learners: focus on variation across different speaking styles. EuroSLA 31, The 31st Conference of the European Second Language Association, European Second Language Association, Aug 2022, Fribourg (CH), Switzerland. ⟨halshs-03984400⟩
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Dernière date de mise à jour le 07/04/2024
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