Acquisition of the internal and external
constraints of variable schwa deletion
by French Immersion students
Raymond Mougeon, Terry
Nadasdi, Katherine Rehner, and Dorin Uritescu
1.
Introduction
First language (L1) sociolinguistic research
has demonstrated that native speakers’ alternation between two or more
linguistic elements (variants) expressing the same meaning is an integral part
of spoken language competence (cf. Labov, 1966 & 1972). It affects all
components of language (syntax, morphology, lexicon, etc.), is highly frequent
in L1 discourse, and is constrained by both linguistic factors (e.g., factors
pertaining to the linguistic context in which the variants are used) and
extra-linguistic factors (e.g., sex, social status or group identity, and
register or style).
However, the bulk of research on second
language (L2) acquisition has focused on aspects of the target language where
native speakers display invariant linguistic usage (i.e., use only one
linguistic element to convey a given notion). In contrast, recent research
taking a sociolinguistic perspective on L2 acquisition has begun to focus on
aspects of the target language where native speakers display sociolinguistic
variation. This type of research has investigated the learning of
sociolinguistic variation in French (e.g., Dewaele, 1999; Dewaele & Regan,
2000; Knaus & Nadasdi, 2001; Mougeon & Rehner, 2001; Nadasdi &
McKinnie, 2003; Regan, 1996; Rehner, Mougeon, & Nadasdi, 2003; Sankoff,
Thibault, Nagy, Blondeau, Fonollosa, & Gagnon, 1997) and a variety of other
languages (e.g., Adamson & Regan, 1991; Bayley & Preston, 1996; Major,
1999; Yamagata & Preston, 1999). Thus, this new strand of research has
started to fill a long-standing gap in the field of L2 acquisition studies.
As part of this new strand of research,
the present paper reports on an analysis of the phenomenon of schwa deletion in
the spoken French of Ontario high school French immersion students who are
learning French as a second language. The process of schwa deletion (e.g., la semaine versus la s’maine) dates back to the 15th-16th century (Morin,
1978) and is a sociolinguistic variable that has been much studied in L1 spoken
European French, notably via corpus-based analysis (Hansen, 1994, 2000; Malécot,
1976; Péretz-Juillard, 1977). Its frequency varies as a function of factors
such as age and style and it is also highly constrained by the factor of
phonetic context. However, the factor of social class does not seem to have
much of an effect on this sociolinguistic variable (Hansen, 2000).
Interestingly, no prior corpus-based research of this phenomenon focused on
spoken Quebec French has been carried out. Two previous studies have looked at
this sociolinguistic variable in Ontario French (Mougeon, Nadasdi, Rehner &
Uritescu, 2002; Uritescu, Mougeon & Handouleh, 2002). Both of these studies
have underscored the effect of phonetic context on schwa deletion. The first
study arrived at findings similar to those of Hansen (2000) in relation to
social class stratification and the second study documented a much higher rate
of schwa deletion in the context of a taped interview than in reading passages.
The present study of schwa deletion in
the spoken French of Ontario high school French immersion students is part of a
larger research project centered on the learning of spoken French
sociolinguistic variation by French immersion students. This larger project
seeks to answer the following questions:
1)
Do the French immersion students under study use
the same range of sociolinguistic variants as do native speakers of Canadian
French?
2)
Do the French immersion students use
sociolinguistic variants with the same discursive frequency as do native
speakers of Canadian French?
3)
Is the French immersion students’ use of sociolinguistic
variants correlated with the same linguistic and stylistic constraints
observable in spoken Canadian French?
4)
What are the independent variables that
influence the French immersion students’ learning of sociolinguistic
variation—for example, the treatment of sociolinguistic variation by French
immersion teachers and the authors of French language arts materials used in
French immersion programs, opportunities to interact with L1 speakers,
influence of the students’ L1(s), influence of intra-systemic factors (e.g.,
markedness of the variants), and influence of the students’ social
characteristics (e.g., social standing, sex)?
To answer these questions, our research
project takes as a starting point sociolinguistic variables that have been
attested by numerous studies on the speech of French Quebeckers. These studies
have been chosen because they are based on corpora that, like our French
immersion student corpus, were collected via semi-formal, semi-directed taped
interviews. This allows us to compare the immersion students with L1 speakers
of Canadian French in the same communicative situation. However, as we have
pointed out above, no such L1 study has yet been conducted for schwa deletion.
Therefore, for the current study of schwa deletion reported in this paper, we
will use the spoken French of high school Franco-Ontarians, also taped during
semi-formal, semi-directed interviews, as the L1 benchmark to assess the
acquisition of this variable phonological rule by the immersion students.
In addition to comparing the French
immersion students’ rates of schwa deletion with those of same-age Francophones
residing in Ontario, Canada, we will also examine the effect of phonetic
context on schwa deletion. Finally, we will measure the extent to which extra-linguistic
factors, such as style, contacts with L1 speakers of French outside the school
setting, sex, and social class, influence rates of schwa deletion.
1.1 Previous Studies of Schwa Deletion in L1 Spoken French
The sociolinguistic
variable under study in the present paper can be defined as the presence or
absence of schwa in unaccented open non-final syllables. This reflects the fact
that schwa in final syllables is almost always deleted in Ontario French, while
it seems to be undergoing variable insertion in contemporary Parisian French
(Uritescu, Mougeon & Handouleh, 2002).
Most studies on schwa in
French have tried to identify the factors that influence its deletion or
maintenance. The most well known factor that has been hypothesized to promote the
maintenance of schwa is the rule of three consonants in French (Walter 1990,
Picard 1991). According to this rule, a schwa cannot be deleted when the
outcome of this deletion is a cluster of three consonants (e.g., mercredià*mercr’di).
Recent studies have also
focused on the evolution of schwa. Some researchers suggest that schwa is
undergoing a process of ‘stabilization’ (i.e., an increase in the number of
words in which the retention of schwa is categorical or more and more frequent,
especially in initial syllables—Fónagy, 1989; Morin, 1978; Walter, 1988, 1990).
Other researchers, based on their analyses of Parisian French corpora, have
noted that young speakers delete schwa more frequently than do older speakers,
suggesting that this vowel is not stabilizing, but undergoing a process of
progressive deletion (Léon & Tennant, 1988; Malécot, 1976; Péretz-Juillard,
1977). Finally, in a recent study on schwa deletion in Parisian French, Hansen
(1994) compares the results of Péretz-Juillard (1977) with the results of her
own corpus (gathered in 1989) and reaches the conclusion that schwa deletion is
not on the increase, but in fact constitutes a stable sociolinguistic variable,
in the Labovian sense of the term.
1.2 Previous studies of schwa
deletion in L2 spoken French
Two previous studies have
examined schwa deletion in the spoken French of L2 learners—Uritescu, Mougeon,
and Handouleh (2002) in the speech of eight immersion students and Thomas
(2002) in that of 87 university level learners. Both studies found that the L2
learners delete schwa at levels below native norms, at least in those contexts
where deletion is not categorical. In connection with this, both studies also
found that the L2 learners follow the hierarchy of phonetic contexts that
constrains schwa deletion in L1 speech. Thomas looked at a binary contextual
opposition, while Uritescu et al.
examined five contexts. Where these two studies differ is in documenting an
influence of extra-curricular exposure to French on the deletion of schwa. Thomas
found that after eight months in an FSL program in a university in France the
L2 learners had not changed their rate of schwa deletion in a significant way,
whereas Uritescu et al. found that
those immersion students who had had the opportunity of staying with a
Francophone family displayed significantly higher rates of schwa deletion than
the remaining students. The difference may reflect the fact that families
provide a richer and more intense opportunity to learn the language than FSL
programs where non-native speakers from the same language background are
grouped together and interact frequently together. Finally, Uritescu et al. found that the immersion students
displayed a somewhat higher level of schwa deletion in the context of a taped
interview than they did in a reading passage.
2. Methodology
The taped semi-directed interviews were carried out among 41
grade 9 and 12 French immersion students. These interviews followed a set of
questions that was modeled on those used for the grade 9 and 12 L1 speakers of
Ontario French. For the present study, we are using a sub-sample of eight
French immersion students and another of nine L1 speakers of Ontario French. It
should be pointed out that the sample of eight immersion students is not
identical to that used by Uritescu, Mougeon, and Handouleh (2002) so as to
enable the possibility of examining the effect of social class and sex with a
more evenly distributed subsample.
2.1 The Immersion Speaker Sample
The French immersion student sample was
collected in a program characterized
by 50% French-medium instruction in grades 5 to 8, followed by 20% in high
school. The immersion program in question is housed in regular English-language
high schools where the great majority of the administrative, teaching, and
maintenance staff, and also students, are not French speaking. In other words,
in the school setting, the immersion students rely almost exclusively on their
French-medium classes to use and be exposed to French.
The
characteristics of the eight immersion students under study here are displayed
in Table 1. As can be seen, the students have had differing degrees of exposure
to French outside the school. Further, they come from homes where neither
parent speaks French, but where both parents are by no means all unilingual
Anglophones.
Table 1 Chief Characteristics of the French
Immersion Student Sub-Sample
|
Grade |
Sex
|
Social Class |
Exposure to T.V. &
Radio in French |
Time in Francophone Environment |
Time with Francophone
Family |
Languages Spoken at Home |
|
9=2 12=6 |
F=7 M=1 |
Middle=4 Upper-Work=4 |
Never=3 Occasional=5 |
0h=3 1-20d=2 3w + =3 |
0h=4 1-13d=1 2w + =3 |
English=5 Romance=2 Other=1 |
2.2 The L1 Speaker Sample
In the province of Ontario, nearly
half a million people speak French as their L1. The nine adolescent speakers of
French from Ontario under study here are from a French-medium high school in
North Bay, Ontario, a city where Francophones represent only 18% of the
population. The Ontario Government guarantees the right to French medium
schooling for Ontario children of Francophone parents. Prior to attending their
French medium high school, the nine Franco-Ontarian students under study here
also attended a French-medium elementary school. These nine students are each
from homes where at least one parent speaks French as a mother tongue. However,
as Table 2 shows, their individual use of French outside the high school is
more or less restricted.
|
Grade |
Sex |
Social Class |
French Language Use Restriction
|
|
9=3 12=6 |
F=3 M=6 |
Middle= 2 Lo-Mid=3 Working=4 |
Unrestricted=3 Semi-restricted=3 Restricted=3 |
3. Previous results for the immersion corpus
Before
turning to the results of the current study, let us highlight some of the
findings arrived at in our larger project examining the learning of
sociolinguistic variation by Ontario French immersion students (see Mougeon,
Nadasdi, & Rehner, 2002; Mougeon, Rehner, & Nadasdi, 2003).
·
The French immersion
students use mildly-marked variants at levels considerably below those of L1
speakers.
Mildly-marked variants are features that do not conform to Standard
French and that are typical of the informal register, but that may also be used
in formal situations. As such, they are not as sharply socially stratified or
stigmatized as vernacular variants and they occur with considerable frequency
in the speech of L1 speakers, even in the context of a semi-formal interview.
Schwa deletion, which is the focus of the present study, is an example of a
mildly-marked variant, since it is both frequent in spoken L1 French, even in
the context of recorded speech, and it is not constrained by social class.
·
The immersion students
display a partial mastery of the linguistic constraints on variation observed
by L1 speakers.
The use of the term ‘partial’ here reflects the fact that we
have found that the immersion students master all the linguistic constraints
for some sociolinguistic variables, only a sub-set of such constraints for
other variables, and none of the linguistic constraints of yet other variables.
·
It is unclear to what extent
the immersion students are able to style shift.
To date, we have examined the effect of style shifting in
connection with only three variables. In two instances the students did not
display the ability to style shift and in the third case that was, as we have
pointed out, focused on schwa, the students displayed some measure of style
shifting ability (interview versus reading passage).
·
The female and/or middle
class immersion students display a stronger preference for formal standard
variants than do the male and/or upper-working class students.
This well attested trend in our research reflects the
immersion students’ sensibility to the treatment of specific variants in their
educational input (e.g., correction on the part of the teachers, categorical
avoidance of certain variants in the teaching materials), rather than
reflecting the internalization of L1 patterns of social stratification.
·
The immersion students with
greater extra-curricular exposure to L1 French use mildly-marked variants more
often than do the remaining students.
This finding is not surprising since, as we have pointed out,
mildly-marked variants are quite frequent in L1 speech and, hence, those
students who are exposed to this speech will have an edge in the learning of
such variants.
3.1
Hypotheses for the immersion students’ deletion of schwa
Given
the above summary of research results on the immersion students’ learning of
sociolinguistic variation and bearing in mind the results of previous studies
of schwa deletion by L2 learners of French, we can make the following
hypotheses regarding the deletion of schwa by the eight French immersion
students under study:
·
The
immersion students will use the mildly-marked variant of schwa deletion less
often than will the L1 speakers of Ontario French.
·
The
immersion students will observe the same overall hierarchy of phonetic
constraints as do the L1 speakers of Ontario French.
·
Whether
the immersion students will display the ability to style shift in relation to
schwa deletion is an open question in the present study because we have opted
to use a more subtle measure of style than that used in the Uritescu et al. (2002) study. Instead of relying
on an opposition between the interview and a reading passage, we are measuring
the effect of topic formality.
·
The
female and/or middle class immersion students will delete schwa less often than
will the male and/or upper working class students.
·
The
immersion students with greater extra-curricular exposure to L1 French will
delete schwa more often than will the remaining students.
4. Results
Firstly,
as we had hypothesized, there is a marked difference in the frequency of use of
the mildly-marked variant of schwa deletion in the speech of the immersion
students and in that of the L1 speakers. The overall frequency of schwa deletion
for the immersion students is 21% (see Table 4), while for the L1 speakers it
is 68% (see Table 3).
To assess the effect of the various linguistic
and extra-linguistic factors examined, we calculated rates of schwa deletion as
a function of these factors and used GoldVarb to determine statistically
significant differences and to identify the factors correlated with schwa
deletion.
The
linguistic factors taken into account are the phonetic contexts in which schwa
undergoes variable deletion. This list, provided below, includes contexts that
have been examined in previous studies (i.e., contexts A-F), since they were
hypothesized to be favorable to schwa deletion, and contexts that have not been
examined in previous studies (i.e., contexts G-L), because they were believed
to be resistant to schwa deletion.
A. Word initial syllable following a pause or
vowel not followed by another schwa:
ça va v(e)nir ‘it will come’
B. Monosyllable
at the beginning of a rhythm group not followed by a foreign
word or a word
beginning with an aspirated ‘h’ nor by a syllable containing a schwa:
j(e) sais pas ‘I don’t know’
C. Sequence of monosyllables not following a
consonant or another schwa:
j(e)
m(e) baignais beaucoup ‘I used
to go swimming a lot’
D. Monosyllable in group medial position and following a vowel:
beaucoup d(e)
monde ‘A lot
of people’
E. Word medial following a single consonant:
je gagne un peu d’argent maint(e)nant ‘I'm making a little money now’
F. Forms such as quelque pronounced [kEk(«)]:
j’ai
lu quelqu(e)s livres ‘I read a few books’
G. Word initial syllable:
following more
than one consonant: sept s(e)maines ‘seven weeks’
following a monosyllable
including a schwa: il faut le d(e)viner ‘you
must guess’
followed by a
syllable containing another schwa: r(e)venir ‘to come back’
H. Monosyllable at the beginning of a rhythm group followed by a:
foreign word: l(e) curling ‘curling’
word beginning
with an aspirated ‘h’: l(e) hibou ‘the owl’
syllable
containing a schwa: j(e) reviens ‘I am coming back’
I. Sequence of monosyllables following:
a consonant: hier j(e)
m(e) suis réveillé tard ‘yesterday
I woke up late’
another schwa: qu’est-ce que j(e)
m(e) rappelle? ‘what do I remember ?’
J. Group medial monosyllable following a consonant:
je pense qu(e) c’est difficile ‘I
think it is difficult’
K. Word medial following more than one
consonant:
exact(e)ment! ‘exactly!’
L. Phrase final que preceded by a consonant:
qu’est-ce qu(e)
tu fais? ‘What
are you doing?’
In order to determine to what extent the immersion students
respect the linguistic constraints of schwa deletion observed by L1 speakers, we
must first examine the speech of the nine Franco-Ontarian adolescents who are
the L1 benchmark for the present study.
As can be seen in Table 3,
there is a considerable range of rates of deletion and associated factor
effects (from 88% deletion to 25%) as a function of phonetic context. The
average deletion rate is 68%. For contexts A, B, and E, the three contexts
considered by Hansen, the Franco-Ontarian adolescents delete schwa 76% of the
time on average compared to Hansen’s native speakers of Parisian French who do
so 72% of the time. Note also that for those contexts that were not included in
previous sociolinguistic research because they were thought to be resistant to
schwa deletion, namely contexts G – L, we find a range of deletion between 25 and
87%. In fact, based on the factor effects, context K turns out to be more
favorable to schwa deletion than to schwa maintenance.
Context |
Total Occurrences (n) |
Schwas Maintained (n) |
Schwas Deleted (n) |
Schwas Deleted (%) |
Factor effect for schwa
deletion |
|
C. |
51 |
6 |
45 |
88 |
0.76 |
|
F. |
48 |
6 |
42 |
88 |
0.75 |
|
E. |
137 |
17 |
120 |
88 |
0.75 |
|
K. |
82 |
11 |
71 |
87 |
0.74 |
|
B. |
614 |
150 |
464 |
76 |
0.57 |
|
D. |
535 |
136 |
399 |
75 |
0.56 |
|
A. |
189 |
61 |
128 |
68 |
0.48 |
|
G. |
76 |
28 |
48 |
63 |
0.43 |
|
I. |
22 |
9 |
13 |
59 |
0.39 |
|
L. |
47 |
29 |
18 |
38 |
0.21 |
|
H. |
40 |
27 |
13 |
33 |
0.17 |
|
J. |
276 |
208 |
68 |
25 |
0.12 |
|
TOTAL |
2117 |
688 |
1429 |
68 |
Input 0.69 Sig. 0.00 |
Table 3 also shows that
there are two natural breaks in the range of deletion rates. There are contexts
that are quite favorable to schwa deletion (i.e., C, F, E and K) and those that
are either somewhat favorable to schwa deletion (i.e., B, D, A, G and I) or
somewhat unfavorable to schwa deletion (i.e., L, H and J).
Let us turn now to results
for the immersion students. Table 4 shows that while there is also a wide range
of rates of deletion and associated factor effects in the immersion students’
speech, three phonetic contexts are, according to the factor effects, highly
favorable to schwa deletion, namely K, E, and C. These three contexts are also
those that are most favorable in the Franco-Ontarian data. Note, however, that
the order of these three contexts is not the same as for the L1 speakers and,
notably, that context K is the most favorable context in immersion speech.
Finally, the second most favorable context for the Franco-Ontarian speakers,
namely context F that corresponds to quelque, almost always pronounced
in L1 French as /kEk/, is a context that is entirely impervious to schwa deletion in the
speech of the immersion students.
Table 4 Schwa
deletion by immersion students as a function of phonetic context
|
Context |
Order for Native Speakers |
Total Occurrences (n) |
Schwas Maintained (n) |
Schwas Deleted (n) |
Schwas Deleted (%) |
Factor effect for schwa
deletion |
|
K. |
C.
F. E. K. |
238 |
47 |
191 |
80 |
0.96 |
|
E. |
195 |
50 |
145 |
74 |
0.95 |
|
|
C. |
185 |
123 |
62 |
34 |
0.76 |
|
|
A. |
B. |
129 |
108 |
21 |
16 |
0.55 |
|
B. |
D. |
670 |
598 |
72 |
11 |
0.43 |
|
G. |
A. |
87 |
79 |
8 |
9 |
0.39 |
|
L. |
G. |
135 |
124 |
11 |
8 |
0.36 |
|
D. |
I. |
690 |
652 |
38 |
6 |
0.27 |
|
I. |
L. |
44 |
42 |
2 |
5 |
0.23 |
|
J. |
H. |
316 |
309 |
7 |
2 |
0.12 |
|
H. |
J. |
18 |
18 |
0 |
0 |
-- |
|
F. |
|
142 |
142 |
0 |
0 |
-- |
|
TOTAL |
2689 |
2132 |
557 |
21 |
Input 0.13 Sig. 0.00 |
|
If we look now at the set of contexts that are somewhat
favorable to schwa deletion in native speech, namely contexts B, D, A, G, and
I, we see that these are also somewhat favorable in the speech of the immersion
students. The only exception is context I which is in the wrong cluster.
Finally, there is also a general match between the immersion students and the
Franco-Ontarians in relation to the contexts that are clearly unfavorable to
schwa deletion.
Having said this, it is interesting
that the rates of deletion expressed in percentages
reveal that outside
of contexts K and E, frequency of schwa deletion in the speech of the immersion
students drops drastically. In fact, in six of the phonetic contexts under
study (i.e., G, L, D, I, J, and H) the percentage of schwa deletion for the
immersion students drops below 10%, whereas in these same contexts the
Franco-Ontarian speakers exhibit a range of deletion rates from 25% to 75%.
4.2
Extra-linguistic Factors
The
data on schwa deletion have been analysed as a function of three
extra-linguistic factors, namely sex and social class, extra-curricular
exposure to French and topic formality. Concerning this latter factor, we
parsed the interview transcripts into stretches of speech associated with eight
different topics that have been regrouped under a formal versus informal
distinction.
Table 5 displays the results of the GoldVarb analysis on the impact of extra-linguistic factors on the immersion students’ deletion of schwa. As can be seen, as far as style is concerned, the immersion students do not display a pattern of style shifting, since this factor was not selected by GoldVarb. Furthermore, the percentage frequency of schwa deletion goes in the wrong direction (i.e., more frequent in the students’ speech on formal topics than in their speech on informal topics). This finding is in contrast with that for the L1 speakers who delete schwa more often in informal topics than in formal ones (73% versus 65%, respectively), the difference having been established as significant by GoldVarb.
Table 5 GoldVarb
analysis of the effect of extra-linguistic factors on schwa deletion by French
immersion students
|
Factors |
Schwa Deletion (n) |
Schwa Deletion (%) |
Schwa Use (n) |
Schwa Use (%) |
Effect for Schwa Deletion |
Style
|
|
||||
|
Formal |
335 |
22 |
1204 |
78 |
n.s. |
|
Informal |
222 |
19 |
946 |
81 |
|
Sex
|
|
||||
|
Female |
488 |
22 |
1729 |
78 |
0.53 |
|
Male |
69 |
14 |
421 |
86 |
0.35 |
Social Class
|
|
||||
|
Middle |
321 |
17 |
1526 |
83 |
n.s. |
|
Upper-Working |
236 |
27 |
624 |
73 |
|
|
French Media |
|
||||
|
Never |
274 |
18 |
1243 |
82 |
0.47 |
|
Occasionally |
283 |
24 |
907 |
76 |
0.53 |
|
Fr. Family |
|
||||
|
Nil |
227 |
16 |
1211 |
84 |
0.42 |
|
1
Week + |
330 |
26 |
939 |
74 |
0.58 |
Fr. Environment
|
|
||||
|
Nil |
159 |
16 |
834 |
84 |
n.s. |
|
1
Week + |
398 |
23 |
1316 |
77 |
|
|
TOTAL |
557 |
21 |
2150 |
79 |
Input
0.19 Sig. 0.03 |
Concerning sex and social class, the findings suggest that the immersion students do not assign a consistent social value to schwa deletion. The factor of social class was not selected by GoldVarb and while the factor of sex was selected it is associated with the inverse pattern to that expected (i.e., unexpectedly, the female students delete schwa significantly more often than do the male students).
Finally, as we had predicted, extra-curricular exposure to L1 French exerts a positive influence on the immersion students’ deletion of schwa. This effect was found with the factors of stays in a Francophone family and exposure to French media. The factor of stay in a Francophone environment was not selected. However, the percentage frequencies differ in the expected direction.
5. Discussion
Let us turn now to a
discussion of the results of the present study. First, we have seen that, as
expected, the immersion students employ the mildly-marked variant of schwa
deletion much less often than do the L1 speakers, 21% versus 68%. While this
clearly reveals a gap between the L2 learners and the L1 norms, it is not as
substantial as the one found in our previous study of /l/ deletion in subject
pronouns in the speech of these same students where they almost never (2%)
delete a sound that is almost categorically (98%) deleted in L1 French (Nadasdi, Uritescu, Mougeon, &
Rehner, 2001). One explanation for
the difference may be that schwa deletion, as we have argued, is a
“natural” phonological process, whereas /l/ deletion is morphophonemic,
process, i.e. it occurs only in specific grammatical morphemes and, hence,
needs to be entirely acquired.
Second, we have seen that,
as hypothesized, the immersion students observe, by and large, the same phonetic
constraints observed by L1 speakers. However these finding may partly reflect
the fact that some of these constraints are natural and universal, (see Donegan
& Stampe, 1979; Dressler, 1985 and Donegan, 1993 on natural phonology). One
context, however, was the locus of a mismatch between the immersion students
and the L1 speakers, namely word medial schwa following more than one consonant. One possible
explanation for this finding is that several of the words that include this
context have an English cognate that does not contain a schwa (e.g., gouvernement
and government; appartement and apartment). Finally,
another difference related to phonetic context was the absence of schwa
deletion in quelque—context F—which, in contrast is almost
categorical in L1 French where its pronunciation as /kEk/ has been lexicalized. A
possible explanation for this is that the students’ teachers may avoid this
informal pronunciation in the classroom.
Finally, as we have seen,
the present study has underscored, as hypothesized, the favorable effect of
exposure to L1 spoken French outside the school context on the immersion
students’ acquisition of a mildly-marked informal variant. The fact that this
variant’s social salience is very low and its discursive frequency very high
likely explains the beneficial effect of extra-curricular interactions with L1
speakers. Further, we have seen that the immersion students do not attach a
clear social value to schwa deletion. This finding is perhaps not too
surprising since schwa deletion is a prime case of a mildly-marked variant that
exhibits little or no correlation with sex and social class in L1 French.
Therefore, one can surmise that teachers in the immersion context do not pay
much attention to the variant of schwa deletion (e.g., they do not correct the
students who delete this vowel and they do not, by and large, refrain from
deleting schwa themselves).[1]
The finding that the immersion students did not display a pattern of style
shifting as a function of topic, while the L1 speakers did, is perhaps not
overly surprising given that, in a previous study, we found that they displayed
only a modest measure of style-shifting ability when we contrasted their
interview speech with their reading passages. Thus, with the much more subtle
measure of style shifting examined in the current study, the immersion students
clearly have a ways to go before they display a native-like pattern.
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