Inlärningen av de svenska tonaccenterna hos finska S2-talare - automatiseras uttalet?

Abstract

Swedish has two tone accents, accents 1 and 2. There are approximately 350 minimal pairs such as ánd-en (duck) and ànde-n (spirit) differentiated only by tone accent. As all stressed words in Swedish have a tone accent, tones are important for achieving nativelike pronunciation. However, this is a challenging task for L2 speakers. In Swedish, the tone accents are potentially difficult both acoustically (cf. phonetic realization) and lexically (cf. morphological distribution). The present study focuses on the learning of Central Swedish tones by advanced L2 speakers with Finnish as their L1 (n = 10). The aim is to reveal if the learning of tones is a realistic goal for advanced adult learners with a non-tonal L1 in read-aloud speech: a) Are tones correctly produced in spontaneous speech, if the learner already masters them in read-aloud speech? b) What are the problems for learners in the tone distribution? and c) How stable is the learning of tones? The results show that 4/10 of the speakers learned to produce nativelike tones during a Swedish pronunciation course. The speakers produced correct tones in both isolated phrases and in spontaneous speech. Accent 2 seemed to be more difficult to learn than accent 1 and the most common problem in distribution was the overuse of accent 1 in words where the target was accent 2. A longitudinal study shows that speakers retained most of the correct production and distribution of tones even 11 weeks after the course.