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Cross-Linguistic Influence in the Perception of French Prosody: ERP Evidence from Turkish Learners
Poster Session E, Friday, October 2, 11:00 am - 1:00 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Özce Özcecelik1, Janne Lorenzen2, Christoph Gabriel2, Mathias Scharinger1; 1Philipps-Universität Marburg, 2Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
The acquisition of prosody in a foreign language has been shown to be challenging, although cross-linguistic similarity from a typologically similar language may facilitate this process. French and Turkish constitute an interesting and understudied language pair in this regard: Both have been described as employing a prosodic system in which prominence can be assigned post-lexically, at the level of the Accentual Phrase (AP) in French and the Prosodic Word in Turkish. Previous studies have shown that violations of expected prosodic patterns in speech processing can reveal event-related potential (ERP) components such as N400 and P600 in native listeners, reflecting expectancy violations and subsequent integration processes. However, EEG studies with non-native listeners processing prosodic contrasts are still rare and little is known about how learners with different or similar prosodic backgrounds perceive deviations from French prosodic patterns. The present study investigates whether native speakers of Turkish learning French as an L3, after having acquired English as an L2, are sensitive to deviations from French prosodic prominence patterns. Twenty-five participants will complete an EEG experiment using two types of auditory stimuli manipulating prominence placement within a disyllabic target word (e.g., dimanche ‘Sunday’). In Type 1 stimuli, the target word is followed by a monosyllabic word within the same AP (e.g., le dimanche soir ‘on Sunday evening’). In the target-like condition, prominence occurs on the initial syllable of the target word (i.e., DImanche) because phrase-final prominence is realized on the following monosyllabic word. In the non-target-like condition, prominence is shifted to the final syllable of the target word (i.e., diMANCHE), creating a more word-based stress pattern that is atypical in French. In Type 2 stimuli, the target word constitutes the only content word in the AP (e.g., le dimanche ‘on Sunday’). Here, the target-like condition contains final prominence on the target word, while the non-target-like condition contains initial prominence. Each of the four experimental conditions (Type 1/Type 2 × target-like/non-target-like) contains 50 items, resulting in 200 trials overall. During EEG recording, participants will judge whether each target word resembles native-like French prosody. Behavioral responses and ERPs will be analyzed across conditions using repeated-measures ANOVAs, with particular focus on components associated with expectancy violations and integration processes in language processing (e.g., N400 and P600). Correlational analyses will further examine whether musicality and working-memory capacity predict sensitivity to French prosodic structure. Data collection is planned to be completed by mid-July 2026, and preliminary analyses will be available at the time of the conference. We predict that Turkish learners will show neural and behavioral sensitivity to prosodic violations despite French not being their native language. This would suggest that similarities between the Turkish and French prosodic systems facilitate the perception of phrase-based prominence patterns. These findings will contribute to models of L3 phonological acquisition by clarifying how cross-linguistic prosodic similarity benefits the neural processing of non-native intonation.
Topic Areas: Prosody, Speech Perception