De productie van de klemtoon in het Nederlands door Franstalige leerders van het Nederlands : een vergelijkende studie tussen muzikanten en niet-muzikanten

Details

Supervisors

Degrave, Pauline

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation germaniques, à finalité didactique

Abstract

enThe link between language and music and the way one affects the mastery of the other has already given rise to much research (Patel, 2008 among others). The difficulty French speakers have in mastering the prosody of Dutch is also a much debated topic (Hiligsmann, 1998; Michaux et al., 2010; Bui et al., 2014; Michaux, 2017). One of the most difficult aspects is lexical stress (or word stress), which does not exist in French. The aim of this thesis is to determine whether there is a significant difference at the level of the production of stress in Dutch between Belgian French-speaking musicians and non-musicians. To this end, 2 French-speaking native speakers and 2 linguistically untrained Dutch speakers indicated where they heard the stress in 30 words pronounced in initial sentence position by 20 French-speaking musicians and 20 French-speaking non-musicians. The observed differences varied widely among evaluators and were never significant, meaning no real conclusions could be drawn. However, we could observe from the results of the analysis by the native speakers - and to a lesser extent by one of the Dutch speakers - that the musicians apply the French stress pattern (i.e. stressing the last syllable) less and understand that the stress pattern of Dutch is different. So music certainly plays a role in the acquisition of Dutch stress by French speakers.