Close vowels in L1 and L2 English and French, and focality

Résumé En

Neighboring formants in the three high vowels in French, F1/F2 for /u/ (↓F1⇓F2)400Hz, F2/F3 for /y/ (F2⇓F3)1900Hz, and F3/F4 for /i/ (⇑F3F4)3200Hz), as well as F1 and F2 in the back vowels /o ɔ ɑ/, aregrouped and therefore their intensity is reinforced (Schwartz et al., 1997; Vaissière, 2011). By contrast, neither /i/ and /u/ are focal in English. Flege (1987) shows that the French /u/, which he considers as a "similar" phone (to the English /u/), is more difficult to learn to pronounce like native speakers than /y/, which is a "new" phone with no equivalent in the learners' L1. Levy's (2009) data confirm this tendency.This talk will show how subtle acoustic differences between native speakers' and L2 learners' speech, underlying the perception of a foreign accent, can be illustrated with the aid of sound spectrography. The close vowels uttered by natives speakers of English learning L2 French reading the Aesop's fable "the North Wind and the Sun" / "la bise et le soleil" in the learner corpus SITAF will be taken as a starting point.A similar difficulty that Japanese-speaking learners of French encounter in learning to pronounce the French /u/ (Kamiyama and Vaissière, 2009) will also be shown based on the IPFC corpus.The effect of the consonantal context, as shown in Levy (2009), is illustrated for both languages and the relationship with articulation by the help of articulatory modeling.