Investigating the Potential Effects of Social Identity on the Phonetic Competence of French Immersion and Core French Learners
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Students in Core French (CF) and French Immersion (FI) French-as-a-second language (FSL) programs have been described as having distinct French accents, however, to date, no particular phonetic characteristics of these accents have been identified. This dissertation thus seeks to identify segmental and prosodic features that may characterize the French pronunciation of both FSL speaker groups. Furthermore, we investigate the potential influence of a social group-based accommodation effect in which CF and FI learners accommodate to group-specific prototypical phonetic features of their FSL group in order to sound like their same-program peers. While L1 phonetic studies have alluded to an interaction between identity and linguistic accommodation, no linguistic studies have used a quantitative measure of social identity in combination with production data from L2 learners. In order to address this gap, we designed a study in which 56 English-speaking CF (n=30) and FI learners (n=26) completed a series of French proficiency measures (i.e., lexical, grammatical, accentedness), a French carrier sentence reading task involving the French rhotic /ʁ/ and the vowels /e i o u/, a passage reading task to elicit broad focus intonation, and an ingroup identification questionnaire as a measure of social identity. FI speakers reported higher levels of social identity than CF speakers, specifically due to increased emotional connection to their FSL program. After accounting for proficiency, acoustic analyses revealed no between-group differences in the realization of /ʁ/ or phrasal tones, however, compared to their CF peers, FI speakers produced more accentual phrases and had greater overall dispersion between vowels pairs /i-u/, /i-o/, /u-e/, and /u-o/, as well as lower F2 values for /u/, and less F2 change in /i/. Finally, a between-group comparative analysis of the vowel space dispersion of identity- and proficiency-matched speakers suggested that social identity underlies dispersion, as speakers with higher social identity have the most prototypical phonetic values of their FSL group.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".