AUC PHILOLOGICA
AUC PHILOLOGICA

AUC Philologica (Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philologica) is an academic journal published by Charles University. It publishes scholarly articles in a large number of disciplines (English, German, Greek and Latin, Oriental, Romance and Slavonic studies, as well as in phonetics and translation studies), both on linguistic and on literary and cultural topics. Apart from articles it publishes reviews of new academic books or special issues of academic journals.

The journal is indexed in CEEOL, DOAJ, EBSCO, and ERIH PLUS.

AUC PHILOLOGICA, Vol 2022 No 1 (2022), 131–149

Longitudinal study of phonetic drift in L1 speech of late Czech-French bilinguals

Marie Hévrová, Tomáš Bořil

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/24646830.2022.33
published online: 17. 01. 2023

abstract

This study investigates temporal development of phonetic drift (i.e., when L1 pronunciation is affected by acquiring an L2 language) in the L1 speech of four Czech university students (two female and two male) who went to study in Toulouse as part of the Erasmus programme. Having started studying L2 French at the age of twelve to sixteen, they are considered the so-called Czech-French late bilinguals. The subjects were recorded reading out a Czech text and producing semi-spontaneous speech in three sessions – immediately after their arrival, and then at the end of the first and the third month of their stay in France. Based on acoustic analyses, we statistically evaluated the formant frequencies of vowels, the spectral moments of the fricatives /ɦ/ and /x/, and the production frequency of schwa in the word-final position, which is a distinctive pronunciation feature for Toulouse French. Even though speech and its development are highly individual, we were able to witness certain pronunciation shifts regarding all the examined phones. However, the majority of statistically significant shifts were linked to the formant values of vowels.

keywords: phonetic drift; late Czech-French bilinguals; vowel quality; spectral moments; word-final schwa

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