Vowel lengthening in L2 Italian and L2 French: a cue for focus marking?

International audience ; Our study investigates the role of vowel duration as acue for focus marking in both L1 and L2 Italian and French.We aim to compare our data to highlight potential influencesof the native language on L2 productions in the use of thiscue. The analysis involves task-elicited speech from 60 partici-pants: 15 native Italian speakers, 15 native French speakers, 15French learners of Italian (L2), and 15 Italian learners of French(L2). Participants produced the same target constituent underfour information-structural conditions: background, broad fo-cus, identification focus, and correction focus. Results revealthat the information-structural function significantly influencesstressed vowel duration in native Italian, with identification-focus and correction-focus constituents bearing longer durationthan background and broad focus. However, the same patterndoes not hold in native French. Crucially, this distinction is mir-rored in the production of non-native speakers. Italian learnersof L2 French, in fact, modulate duration based on the infor-mational role of the constituent; in contrast, French learners ofItalian L2 do not. We discuss these findings in relation to pre-vious findings on other prosodic and syntactic markers of fo-cus. Results are commented in light of typological differencesin discourse-prominence marking and theories of L2 prosodyacquisition.