Phonetic vs. phonological influences on French listeners' perception of American English approximants

Abstract

The perception of American English (AE) approximant contrasts, /r/-/l/ in particular but also /w/-/r/ and /w/-/j/, has been extensively compared between AE speakers and speakers of Japanese or other languages lacking an /r/-/l/ contrast. The difficulty such listeners encounter with the AE /r/-/l/ contrast, especially those who have had little exposure to spoken English, has most often been explained by reference to the abstract functional contrasts of their native phonological systems, which lack distinctions between rhotic (/r/) and lateral (/l/) consonants. According to that reasoning, speakers of languages who do possess an /r/-/l/ distinction, such as French, should encounter little or no perceptual difficulty with AE /r/-/l/. However, French and AE /r/s differ markedly in their articulatory-phonetic characteristics, which suggests the possibility that French listeners might have some difficulty categorizing AE /r/. The present study therefore examined identification and discrimination of the AE continua /r/-/l/, /w/-/r/, and /w/-/j/ by French participants. As anticipated on the basis of the phonetic differences between the /r/s of the two languages, the French listeners had some perceptual difficulties with AE /r/, which they tended to assimilate as /w/-like. We conclude that the detailed articulatory-phonetic properties of the native versus non-native consonant categories, rather than solely the abstract phonological contrasts of the two languages, account for this perceptual pattern.