NATIVE FRENCH SPEAKERS' PERCEPTION OF THE JAPANESE /h/: HA PIECE HOF CAKE?

Takeki Kamiyama (1, 2) , Yayoi Nakamura-Delloye (3)

1 LECSeL - Linguistique Empirique : Cognition, Société et Langage
2 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018
3 CEJ EA 1441 - Centre d'Études Japonaises

It is commonly observed that native French speakers tend to drop nonnative /h/-like phonemes, or to insert them where unexpected, in the " /h/ languages " they learn (e.g. English). The perception of the Japanese /h/ by French listeners was tested by way of an AXB discrimination task on non-words and a word identification task on Japanese minimal pairs. For naïve listeners not learning Japanese (N=9), the error rate in the discrimination task ranged from 0% to 12.5%; for elementary level learners of Japanese (N=8) the error rate in the identification task ranged from 0% to 8%. 12 errors out of 17 in the latter task occurred when a less familiar word was identified as a more familiar one. These findings suggest that the French perception of the Japanese /h/ is not as difficult as other reported major difficulties in L2 acquisition, and that it interacts with lexical acquisition.

Mots clés: Japanese /h/; French-speaking learners; perception; identification; discrimination

Domaines: Linguistique

Takeki Kamiyama, Yayoi Nakamura-Delloye. NATIVE FRENCH SPEAKERS' PERCEPTION OF THE JAPANESE /h/: HA PIECE HOF CAKE?. The 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Aug 2015, Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom. Paper 0871. ⟨hal-01431073⟩