French-German L2 Prosody: from the Lab into Practice

• Applicants: Dr. Jürgen Trouvain; Professorin Dr. Katharina Zahner-Ritter
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 567403450

The prosody of non-native speakers is a continuously growing area of research. Despite this, prosody (still) has a Cinderella status in second language (L2) teaching – even though experimental research has shown that language learners would clearly benefit from prosodic skills in spoken communication. Based on the language pair French-German, the aims of the project are (1) to bridge the gap between experimental research and teaching by concentrating on three core prosodic phenomena, namely word stress, contrastive focus, and speech fluency, and (2) to ultimately provide tailor-made teaching materials for instructed L2 learning. In doing so, we extend previous studies that have typically addressed only one of these goals. For each of the three prosodic phenomena, we develop training and experiments for both speech production and perception. Pre-tests, post-tests, and delayed post-tests will be administered to three groups of learners: the prosodic training of the two experimental groups will include visual support, either gestures or graphics, in contrast to the control group which will work on vocabulary. The training and experiments will be carried out digitally, using an app to be professionally developed in our project. In order to test whether deviations in the L2 prosody of the phenomena under investigation are really problematic for native (L1) speakers and whether there are differences between the phenomena, we will investigate the willingness of L1 speakers to “forgive” deviations from L1 speech. By concentrating on prosody, we will make an important contribution to the expansion of this understudied area of research, the so-called flexibility of mental representations. Based on the results of the two experimental parts (effectiveness of the materials, flexibility of mental representations), we will produce teaching materials that will be made available to teachers as CC-licensed Open Educational Resources (OER) on relevant official platforms in France and Germany. Our project hence bears implications for L2 research, language pedagogy, and stakeholders in instructed L2 learning.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France
• Partner Organisation: Agence Nationale de la Recherche / The French National Research Agency
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Ingo Feldhausen