In languages with lexical stress, stress is computed in the phonological word (PWd) and realized in the foot. In some of these languages, feet are constructed iteratively, yielding multiple stressed syllables in a PWd. English has this profile. In French, by contrast, the only position of obligatory prominence is the right-edge of the phonological phrase (PPh), regardless of how many lexical words it contains (Dell 1984). This has led some to analyze French "stress" as intonational prominence and French, in contrast to most languages, as foot-less (Jun & Fougeron 2000). In earlier work, we argued that high vowel deletion (HVD) motivates iterative iambic footing in Quebec French (QF), although the typical signatures of word-level stress are absent. In this paper, we examine the L2 acquisition of HVD and the prosodic constraints that govern it. We show that L2ers can acquire subtle aspects of the phonology of a second language, even at intermediate levels of proficiency.
Phonological phrase boundary and word frequency that influence the
phonological word recognition*
