Perception and production of French oral vowels by Japanese-speaking learners: does dialectal variation play a role? Perception and production of French oral vowels by Japanese-speaking learners: does dialectalvariation play a role? En Fr

Résumé En

This talk presents a series of studies on the impact of regional variation in L1 (source language) on L2 (target language) pronunciation, focusing on the high back vowel /u/ in French perceived or produced by native speakers of Japanese from the Tokyo and Osaka areas. 1) The 5 Japanese vowels were pronounced by 11 speakers (5 women and 6 men) from Kansai (Osaka) with no learning experience of French and their first 4 formants were measured to examine their acoustic properties. 2) 25 naïve listeners from Kansai took part in an AXB auditory discrimination task of French vowels including pairs /u/-/y/, /y/-/ø/ and /u/-/ø/; the results were compared with those of Tokyo speakers in previous studies. 3) Some Japanese-speaking lear- ners of French (JSL) from Kansai produced the French /u/ with a lower F2 (around 1000 Hz for men) than typical values observed for learners from the Tokyo area. These results show some limited differences for some of the speakers from Kansai compared to the tendency commonly observed with Tokyo speakers.