L’interprétation prosodique des points d’exclamation dans la parole des apprenants finnophones du français

Each language has its own intonation system (Hirst & Di Cristo, 1998). French is characterised by large pitch movements (e.g. Di Cristo, 1998; Mertens, 2008; Morel & Danon-Boileau, 1998; Rossi, 1999), whereas the intonation of Finnish is characterised by a certain monotony created by a narrow variation range of fundamental frequency (Iivonen, 1998). In this article, we compare the prosodic interpretation of exclamation marks by Finnish-speaking learners of French and by a control group consisting of native speakers of French.

Our results show that in 64.0% of cases, native speakers of French interpret exclamation marks with a final ‘rising-falling’ pitch movement. This is not surprising, because according to previous studies (Delais-Roussarie et al. 2015; Di Cristo, 2016), this type of pitch contour is typical of exclamations of French. In the speech of the Finnish-speaking learners of French, this type of pitch contour is more rare: it occurs only in 30.7% of cases. In addition, the falling part of the pitch movement is shorter in the speech of the Finnish-speaking learners than in the speech of the native speakers. Most often, the Finnish-speaking learners mark the presence of an exclamation mark by a pitch fall (37.3%). This type also occurs in the speech of the native speakers, but more rarely (20.0%). The exclamation marks can also lead to a pitch rise both in the speech of the native speakers (16.0%) and in the speech of the Finnish-speaking learners (22.7%), but this is not very frequent.

Out data consist of recordings where 15 Finnish-speaking learners of French and five native speakers of French read aloud an extract of a dialogue drawn from the play Waiting for Godot (Beckett, 1952). The Finnish-speaking informants are university students who attended a French course at the Language Centre of the University of Helsinki (Finland). Their proficiency level of spoken French is A1-A2 (CEFR, 2022). The native speakers of French are Erasmus students at the University of Helsinki.