Nouveaux cahiers de linguistique française 28 (2007), 41-66. Prosodic transfer from L1 to L2. Theoretical and methodological issues Laurent Rasier & Philippe Hiligsmann Département d’Études germaniques Université catholique de Louvain laurent.rasier@uclouvain.be, philippe.hiligsmann@uclouvain.be Résumé/Abstract Much research on the acquisition of phonological skills in a second/foreign language has hitherto been concerned with the phonemes of the target language, thereby disregarding suprasegmentals. The first part of this paper reviews past research on the acquisition of prosody, with special emphasis on the role of the mother tongue in the learning process. Then we set out to examine the methods and tools that were used in order to investigate prosodic transfer. The discussion leads us to propose an alternative method combining text-based contrastive analysis, system- based contrastive analysis and contrastive interlanguage analysis. This method is put to the test in a study of (pitch) accent in L2 Dutch and L2 French. 1. Introduction The significance of cross-linguistic influence/L1 transfer, i.e. the carry over of linguistic patterns from the mother tongue (L1) to the second/foreign language (L2), has long been a controversial issue in applied linguistics, L2 acquisition research and language teaching (Ellis 1994, Odlin 1989). Despite the myriad of transfer studies that have been conducted over the past four decades, there still remains a surprising level of confusion and uncertainty in the field concerning when, where, in what form(s), and to what extent L1 influence mani- fests itself in the L2 learners’ use of the target language (Jarvis 2000). This paper examines the role of the L1 in the L2 acquisition of su- prasegmentals/prosody, i.e. a combination of tonal, temporal and dy- namic features associated with such suprasegmental aspects of phono- logy as stress, accent, tone, rhythm, intonation, and pauses. More spe- cifically, we discuss both past research results as well as methods of data collection and analysis. We also propose a methodological path for the study of prosodic transfer. This method is finally put to the test in a study of the L2 acquisition of pitch accent in Dutch and French.