Muziek in de oren, accent op de tong: Onderzoek naar de zinsaccentproductie van Franstalige leerders van het Nederlands zonder en met een muzikale opleiding

Details

Supervisors

Degrave, Pauline

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en linguistique, à finalité spécialisée: Linguistics and its Applications for a Multilingual Society

Abstract

enFrench-speaking learners face significant challenges in acquiring Dutch prosody due to fundamental prosodic differences between the two languages. Dutch features lexical stress, which can change the meaning of an identical word depending on the stressed syllable, and sentence stress (SS), which serves a contrastive or focus function to emphasize new or contrasted information. In contrast, French uses fixed final stress (Di Cristo, 2000) that fulfills a demarcative function. This discrepancy often leads French-speaking learners of Dutch to transfer their native SS patterns, resulting in bridge accents where multiple elements in a sentence are stressed, regardless of the informational context. Rasier & Hiligsmann (2007) highlighted these difficulties, showing that learners tend to produce non-native-like SS patterns across different informational contexts. Musical training has been shown to improve linguistic competences, notably at prosodic level, with studies suggesting that musicians are better at perceiving prosodic features (Degrave, 2019; Jansen, et al., 2023). However, the impact of musical training on prosody production remains underexplored, particularly in languages other than English and French. This study investigates whether French-speaking musicians outperform non-musicians in a Dutch SS production task and explores the SS patterns used by both groups across different informational contexts. 18 non-musicians and 18 musicians were tested. The production task, adapted from Rasier and Hiligsmann (2007), was used to analyze the SS productions of the participants. Learners were asked to elicit noun phrases (‘indefinite article + adjective + noun’) across four informational contexts in a picture description task of geometrical figures. This design allows for examining whether participants adapt their SS placement to reflect the different informational contexts. The recordings were evaluated by four naïve native speakers of Belgian Dutch and four linguists. The results did not provide significant evidence that musicians outperformed non-musicians. Both groups performed similarly overall. These findings suggest that the influence of musical training on prosody production may be more nuanced than anticipated. While previous studies have emphasized the role of musical training in enhancing L2 prosody perception, its impact on SS production warrants further investigation. However, modelling the data into a Generalized Linear Mixed Model, significant results were obtained for two other variables than ‘musical profile’, namely ‘context’ and ‘groups of judges’. This might be explained by the fact that musicians were selected based on a self-report. A musical test in the selection procedure of future studies might provide another picture of significance.