The effectiveness of embodied prosodic training in L2 accentedness and vowel accuracy

This study explores the effects of embodied prosodic training on the production of non-native French front rounded vowels (i.e. /y, ø, œ/) and the overall pronunciation proficiency. Fifty-seven Catalan learners of French practiced pronunciation in one of two conditions: one group observed hand gestu...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Li, Peng, Baills, Florence, Baqué, L., Prieto, Pilar
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión enviada para evaluación y publicación
Fecha de publicación:2023
País:España
Institución:Varias* (Consorci de Biblioteques Universitáries de Catalunya, Centre de Serveis Científics i Acadèmics de Catalunya)
Repositorio:Recercat. Dipósit de la Recerca de Catalunya
OAI Identifier:oai:recercat.cat:10459.1/468549
Acceso en línea:https://doi.org/10.1177/02676583221124075
https://hdl.handle.net/10459.1/468549
http://hdl.handle.net/10459.1/468549
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Accentedness
Hand gestures
Prosody
Second language pronunciation
Vowel
Descripción
Sumario:This study explores the effects of embodied prosodic training on the production of non-native French front rounded vowels (i.e. /y, ø, œ/) and the overall pronunciation proficiency. Fifty-seven Catalan learners of French practiced pronunciation in one of two conditions: one group observed hand gestures embodying prosodic features of the sentences they were listening to, while the other group did not see any such gestures. The learning outcome was assessed in a pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest through a dialogue-reading task and a sentence imitation task in terms of accentedness, comprehensibility and fluency scores, and through formant analysis of participant-produced target vowels. The results showed that compared to non-embodied training, embodied prosodic training yielded continuous improvement in accentedness in both tasks and improved the F2 values of French front rounded vowels (more fronted). As for comprehensibility and fluency scores, both groups showed similar levels of significant improvement. This study highlights the interaction between prosodic and segmental features of speech by showing that training with embodied prosodic features benefitted accentedness and the production accuracy of non-native vowels.