French-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 a word, and sentence stress (SS), which serves a contrastive or focus function to emphasize new or contrasted information. In contrast, French uses fixed final stress for demarcative purposes, typically falling on the last element of a word or sentence. 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. Previous research 1 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 2. However, the impact of musical training on prosody production remains underexplored, particularly in languages other than English. 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. Forty French-speaking learners of Dutch aged 18–26 (M=20.32, SD=1.77) with proficiency levels between B1 and B2 participated in the study. Language proficiency was assessed through Dialang and LexTALE tests. 20 musicians and 20 non-musicians were tested, based on the following criteria: musicians had a minimum of five years of formal training and continued practice, while non-musicians had at most two years of training, which ended more than eight years ago. The production task adapted from 1 was used to analyze the SS productions of the participants. Learners were asked to elicit noun phrases (NPs; ‘indefinite article + adjective + noun’) across four information value 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 two linguist experts. However, the preliminary results presented here rely on one native speaker’s assessment, with further analyses still ongoing. The first results did not provide clear evidence of a consistent advantage for musicians over non-musicians. Both groups performed similarly overall. Across the four contexts, both groups shared five SS patterns even if some differences can be observed. These initial findings suggest that the influence of musical training on prosody production may be more nuanced than anticipated. Analyses currently underway will establish whether initial findings are confirmed. While previous studies have emphasized the role of musical training in enhancing L2 prosody perception, its impact on SS production warrants further investigation. References 1 Rasier, L., & Hiligsmann, P. (2007). Prosodic transfer from L1 to L2. Theoretical and methodological issues. Nouveaux Cahiers de Linguistique Française, 28, 41-66. 2 Jansen, N., Harding, E. E., Loerts, H., Başkent, D., & Lowie, W. (2023). The relation between musical abilities and speech prosody perception: A meta-analysis. Journal of Phonetics, 101, 101278.
Degrave et al. (Wed,) studied this question.