One sound heard as two: The perception of affricates in Quebec French by Belgian French speakers

Abstract

In Quebec French, the stops /t/ and /d/ are pronounced as affricates in front of high vowels (e.g., tir ‘shoot’ is spoken [tsir]). Affricates are special consonants composed of two sounds, a stop-plosive followed by a fricative, that are spoken into a single sound. In this study, we investigated how affricates are heard by Belgian French speakers. We hypothesized that affricates are heard as two sounds. To test this prediction, we used a phoneme reversal task. Belgian speakers heard a nonword spoken by a Quebec French speaker (e.g., ati spoken [atsi]) and were asked to reverse the order of the phonemes. If they hear two sounds in the affricate [ts], they should reverse it as [st]. Results confirmed the predictions in showing that a high proportion of the Belgian speakers decomposed the affricates into two sounds. These findings indicate that we analyze the acoustic signal using our linguistic experience.