Best, Catherine T. & Michael Douglas Tyler. 2007. Nonnative and second-language speech perception: Commonalities and complementarities. In Ocke-Schwen, Murry J. Munro (ed.), Language experience in second language speech learning: In honor of James Emil Flege, 13–34. Amsterdam, NL: John Benjamins.

Flege, James E. & Ocke-Schwen Bohn. 2021. The revised Speech Learning Model (SLM-r). In R. Wayland (ed.), Second Language Speech Learning: Theoretical and Empirical Progress, 3–83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kleiner, Stefan. 2011. Atlas zur Aussprache des deutschen Gebrauchsstandards (AADG). prowiki.ids-mannheim.de/bin/view/AADG/ (01.11.2023)

Moosmüller, Sylvia, Carolin Schmid & Julia Brandstätter. 2015. Standard Austrian German. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 45(3). 339–348.

Pustka, Elissa, Elisabeth Heiszenberger & Léa Courdès-Murphy. 2021. Progression et stagnation – le schwa et la liaison dans un corpus de 145 élèves autrichiens (12 à 18 ans). In Elissa Pustka (ed.), La prononciation dans l’enseignement du FLE : perspectives linguistiques et didactiques, 17-46. Tübingen: Narr.

In German, there exists a considerable variation of the realization of <s>: while in Northern German varieties the latter is pronounced as voiced in initial and intervocalic position (e.g., Sonne [ˈzo̞nə] 'sun'; Reise [ˈʁaɛ̯zɛ] 'journey'), in Austria the voiced variant is usually only realized in intervocalic position – if at all (e.g., Sonne [ˈs̬o̞nə]). In word-final position <s> is realized as voiceless (final-obstruent devoicing) in both, Northern and Southern German varieties. In the case of postalveolar fricatives, the voiced variant /ʒ/ exists only in French borrowings, and only in Northern German varieties (e.g., Gelantine [ʒelan'tiːnə] ‘gelatine’), where it is sometimes realized as [dʒ]. In Austria, the voiced variant does not exist (Kleiner 2011, Moosmüller et al. 2015). In French, on the other hand, /s/:/z/ and /ʃ/:/ʒ/ are phoneme oppositions (e.g., seau [so] ‘bucket’ vs. zoo [zo] ‘zoo’). According to current L2 learning models (Best & Tyler, 2007; Flege & Bohn, 2021), the production of these non-native phonological contrasts might be challenging for Austrian learners of French. They are expected to map [z] and [ʒ] onto the acoustically and articulatorily closest native categories [s] and [ʃ]. However, given that Austrian teenagers are daily influenced by audiovisual (social) media in which northern German varieties dominate, it remains unclear how French sibilant pronunciation develops in the speech of Austrian high school students.

To address this question, as part of a six-year longitudinal study conducted within the research program Pronunciation in progress (Pro2F; Pustka et al. 2021), we analyzed the frication and voicing duration of French sibilants in initial (e.g. zoo vs. seaux), intervocalic (e.g. des zoos vs. des seaux) and word-final position (e.g. cage vs. cache) in the speech of 23 Austrian high school students (aged 12-15 years), performing a word reading task once every year during their first six years of learning. The results were compared to German word-initial and word-final <s> produced by the same Austrian students while reading aloud the text “Nordwind und Sonne” (“The northwind and the sun”).

Regarding the pronunciation of German sibilants, preliminary results show that, contrary to what has been assumed so far for Austrian German, there is a high inter-speaker variability among the students: in initial position, 27% of the sibilants are realized as voiced. In French, too, they have fewer problems producing the voiced variant in initial position than in final position. This is particularly the case in the sixth year of learning, where the students realize 46% of sibilants as voiced in initial position, whereas in the first year of learning they produce the voiced variant in only 18% of the cases. However, we observe a high degree of inter-speaker variation in the evaluation of French sibilant pronunciation which mirrors German sibilant pronunciation patterns. This suggests that L2 phonological learning seems to be strongly influenced by individual differences in L1 phonetic and phonological categories, as well as by L1 language change. Two aspects that need to be taken into account in further L2 learning models (Flege & Bohn, 2021).