Vol. 2 (2026)
Oral Data Production

L2FOC: a crosslinguistic speech corpus for French and Italian Second Language Acquisition

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  • Bianca Maria De Paolis,
  • Simone Stroppiana
Bianca Maria De Paolis
Università di Torino, Italy
Simone Stroppiana
Università di Torino, Italy
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/oar-3497

Published 2026-05-12

Keywords

  • second language acquisition,
  • information structure,
  • romance languages,
  • syntax-prosody interface,
  • task-elicited speech

How to Cite

De Paolis, B. M., & Stroppiana, S. (2026). L2FOC: a crosslinguistic speech corpus for French and Italian Second Language Acquisition. Oral Archives Journal, 2, 5–25. https://doi.org/10.36253/oar-3497

Copyright (c) 2026 Bianca Maria De Paolis, Simone Stroppiana

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This paper presents L2FOC, a crosslinguistic corpus of spoken Italian and French developed to investigate the syntactic and prosodic realisation of focus in both native and non-native speech. The corpus includes approximately 10 hours of recordings from 65 speakers across four groups (L1/L2 Italian and French), collected through three tasks designed to elicit speech with a ranging degree of spontaneity. Recordings were made with laboratory equipment and are accompanied by orthographic transcriptions and multi-tier phonetic and phonological alignment. The corpus enables fine-grained analysis of how information structure is encoded across languages and proficiency levels, and supports applications in both theoretical linguistics and speech technology. To illustrate its analytical potential, two studies are briefly discussed: one examining the syntax–prosody interface in L2 focus strategies, and one assessing automatic speech recognition performance on learner speech.

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