Prosody and head gestures as markers of information status in French as a native and foreign language

Abstract Prosody and gesture are two known cues for expressing information structure by emphasising new or important elements in spoken discourse while attenuating given information. Applying this potentially multimodal form-meaning mapping to a foreign language may be difficult for learners. This study investigates how native speakers and language learners use prosodic prominence and head gestures to differentiate levels of givenness. Twenty-five Catalan learners of French and 19 native French speakers were video-recorded during a short spontaneous narrative task. Participants’ oral productions were annotated for information status, perceived prominence, pitch accents, and head gesture types. Results show that given information in French is multimodally less marked than new -er information and is accordingly perceived as less prominent. Our findings indicate that Catalan learners of French mark given information more frequently than native speakers and may transfer their use of low pitch accents to their second language (L2). The data also show that the use of head gestures depends on the presence of prosodic marking, calling into question the assumption that prosody and gesture have balanced functional roles. Finally, the type of head gesture does not appear to play a significant role in marking information status.