# On the difficulties of French speakers to perceive the English falling-rising contour

Antoine Régis, Sophie Dufour, Sophie Herment, Amandine Michelas

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

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Antoine Régis, Sophie Dufour, Sophie Herment, Amandine Michelas. On the difficulties of French speakers to perceive the English falling-rising contour. Phonologie de l'anglais contemporain, Jun 2025, Aix-en-Provence, France. halshs-05187253

HAL Id: halshs-05187253

https://shs.hal.science/halshs-05187253v1

Submitted on 22 Aug 2025

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How do French listeners perceive English intonation? The case of the fall-rise contour

While the influence of the native language on the perception of segments is well established, the influence of the native language on the perception of suprasegmental features such as intonation contours is less known. Previous studies have suggested that the processing of intonation would be less sensitive to native language experience than segmental processing because it would be based mostly on general auditory mechanisms [1]. Grabe and colleagues [1] compared the ability of English, Spanish and Chinese listeners to discriminate between several types of falling and rising English intonation contours. While all groups of listeners were able to distinguish between falls and rises, no differences were observable between different rises. By contrast, a more recent study [2] showed that listeners can discriminate between different types of rises provided that these rises have a linguistic function in their native language. The perception of intonation would thus be more influenced by the existing inventory of contours in the native language than on general auditory mechanisms.

In this study, we provided a more in-depth examination of the hypothesis according to which the existing inventory of intonation contours in the native language influences the perception of intonation. To do so, we investigated how French and English speakers discriminate two types of rising contours: a simple rise (L*H-H%) and a fall-rise (H*L-H%, see [3, 4, 5]). While the simple rise exists both in English and in French, the fall-rise contour (also called tone 2 in Halliday’s system [6]) is common in both British and American English to indicate doubt or disapproval ([6]) but it does not exist in the French inventory of contours.

Two groups of participants, a group of native speakers of American English and a group of French native speakers performed an ABX task. In this task, participants heard nonwords created by a concatenation of two English words (ex. the nonword *maridy* coming from *mariner* and *melody*) produced by three different American English speakers and had to indicate whether X was identical to A or B. The A and B stimuli varied in their intonation contour and were produced as either a simple rise (L*H-H%) or a fall-rise contour (H*L-H%, Figure 1).

The results showed that French listeners had significantly more difficulties than American English listeners to perform the ABX discrimination task based on intonation contours (Figure 2). Because the fall-rise contour exists in the American English inventory of contours but not in the French inventory, the difficulties observed for the French listeners argue in favour of the claim that the existing inventory of intonation contours in the native language influences the perception of intonation. In a more general way, our results constitute a further demonstration that the inventory of contours in the native language shapes the way listeners perceive intonation contours [2], just as the inventory of phonemes shapes the perception of phonemes [7].
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1. *Phonemic and prosodic profile for the nonword maridy produced by a female voice with a simple rising contour (left panel) and with a fall-rise contour (right panel).*</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2. *Percentage of correct responses for English and French listeners. Error bars represent standard error.*</figcaption></figure>

[1] Grabe, E., Rosner, B. S., García-Albea, J. E., & Zhou, X. 2003. Perception of English intonation by English, Spanish, and Chinese listeners. *Language and Speech, 46*(4), 375-401.

[2] Schmidt, E., Kung, C., Post, B., Yuen, I., & Demuth, K. 2016. L1 experience shapes the perception of intonational contours. *Proc. Speech Prosody 2016, 242-246.*

[3] Silverman, K. E., Beckman, M. E., Pitrelli, J. F., Ostendorf, M., Wightman, C. W., Price, P., Pierrehumbert, J., Hirschberg, J. 1992. ToBI: A standard for labeling English prosody. In *ICSLP, (2), 867-870.*

[4] Pierrehumbert, J. 1980. *The phonology and phonetics of English intonation* [Doctoral dissertation, Bloomington/Indiana University Linguistics Club].

[5] Grice, M., Ladd, D. R., & Arvaniti, A. 2000. On the place of phrase accents in intonational phonology. *Phonology, 17*(2), 143-185.

[6] Halliday, M. A. K. 1970. *A course in spoken English: intonation*. London: Oxford University Press.

[7] Best, C. T., McRoberts, G. W., & Goodell, E. 2001. Discrimination of non-native consonant contrasts varying in perceptual assimilation to the listener's native phonological system. *The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 109*(2), 775-794.