L2A of French word-final clusters (Steele 1999)

Description: This study investigated the acquisition of French word-final stop-liquid and liquid-stop clusters as well as nasal vowel-stop sequences by English-speaking learners of novice, beginner, intermediate, and advanced proficiency in Montreal and Kingston, ON as well as beginner Mandarin-speaking learners in Montreal. Native Quebec French speakers served as controls. All learners were university educated and ranged in age from 19-35 years at the time of testing.

Data elicitation: Learners participated in a word-learning task. Targets (Liquid-obstruent=12; Obstruent-liquid=20; Nasal vowel-obstruent=18) were randomized and grouped into 10 sets of 5 words each. For each word in a set, subjects first saw an image accompanied by the orthographic form of the target word and heard the word repeated twice; learners then said the word once when prompted (REP). Once all five words were presented individually, subjects read five sentences, each sentence containing one of the words with the image of the word imbedded in the sentence (READ). Finally, the five images - minus the orthographic form of the targets - were randomized and presented to the subjects; subject had to name (NAME) the images.