Targetless schwa in French L2

Preliminary results on Italian non-native speakers

Abstract

This paper focuses on how non-native consonant clusters are produced by Italian learners of French L2 depending on speech rate, prosodic conditions and sequence type. We compare the productions by three Italian learners and one native speaker, paying particular attention to epenthetic vowels, which are possibly inserted between the two consonants. We examine the acoustic and articulatory characteristics of these contexts to observe how consonant gestures are coordinated and if the insertion of a vowel corresponds to a full vowel insertion (i.e. there is an articulatory target) or to a gestural mistiming (i.e. there is no articulatory specific vowel target). Results show that the inserted vowel has a high variability in acoustic quality and duration; moreover, on the articulatory level, no target has been identified for the tongue dorsum gesture and different patterns are actually realized because of the influence of speech rate, prosodic conditions and sequence type. Our results suggest that vowel insertion in Italian speakers production seems to be due to the failure in reaching a correct coordination between the two consonantal gestures (gestural mistiming).