Bridging the gap between theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics in L2 phonology: Acquisition and processing of word stress by French Canadian L2 learners of English

This study attempts to bridge the gap between theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics in second language (L2) phonology by investigating the acquisition and processing of word stress by French Canadian L2 learners of English. It assumes a constraint-based view of prosodic phonology and is couched within the Autonomous Induction Theory (Carroll, 2001). Its purpose is to reach a better understanding of the interaction between the acquisition of L2 grammatical knowledge (e.g., the creation of alignment relations between the prosodic constituents in a representation) and the development of L2 parsing procedures (e.g., the selection of correspondences between representations at different levels---acoustic, prosodic, and lexical).; French Canadian L2 learners of English at three proficiency levels (intermediate, n=29; low-advanced, n=29; high-advanced, n=18) and native speakers of English (n=31) completed four experiments targeting the acoustic perception of stress (AXB perception task), the acquisition of the trochaic (i.e., stressed-unstressed) foot and the alignment of its head with heavy (i.e., bimoraic) syllables (nonsense-word production task), the use of stress in word recognition (cross-modal word identification task), and the relationship between knowledge of (surface) stress placement and use of stress in word recognition (vocabulary production task).; The results reveal that all the L2 learners could perceive stress acoustically, and most had acquired the trochaic foot, but they generally failed to align the head of the foot with heavy syllables. The L2 learners' productions (nonsense-word and vocabulary production tasks) suggest that they instead aligned the trochaic foot with the left edge of the word, in part (it is argued) because of the overwhelming occurrence of word-initial stress in English (Clopper, 2002). The results also show that several L2 learners were able to use stress to recognize English words, but those who used an iambic foot in English (production task) or who produced incorrect stress patterns (vocabulary production task) failed to do so, thereby suggesting an implicational relationship between target-like knowledge of foot structure and processing of stress.; These findings indicate a tight connection between the acquisition of L2 grammatical knowledge and the development of L2 parsing procedures, with the former being necessary for (but not guaranteeing) the latter.