Phonetic input, phonological categories and orthographic representations: A psycholinguistic perspective on why language education needs oral corpora. The case of French-Japanese interphonology development

Abstract

In this paper, we try to show that oral corpora can be used in L2 education to help learners improve their oral skills. More specifically, we concentrate on the role of oral corpora data as phonetic input for L2 phonology learning. After a brief presentation of the growing number of experiments devoted to what has been called ‘Fine Phonetic Detail' in speech processing studies, we examine a series of work that report a positive effect of high-variability stimuli training for Japanese learners of English on the perception and production of the /r/-/l/ distinction. We point out the importance of the role of the orthographic factor in L2 speech perception and learning, which we illustrate in the case of Japanese learners of French and the French liquid /r/ and /l/. Finally, we briefly present the PFC (Phonologie du Francais Contemporain) corpus and its pedagogical exploitation in the PFC-EF (Enseignement du Francais) project as a source of phonetic input for oral French learning.