Realisation, elision and intrusion of /h/ in French learners of English

Abstract

As the phonological systems of English and French diverge both at the segmental level and at the prosodic level, French learners encounter difficulties with English pronunciation. One example is the glottal fricative /h/ since it is absent from the French phonemic inventory–with the exception of the onomatopoeia “haha” to express laughter. Following studies by Exare (2017) and Kamiyama et al. (2011), this paper aims to provide further empirical evidence of the realisation, elision, and intrusion of /h/ in French speakers’ English productions. The learners were university students who did not major in English. The participants were given three tasks, i.e., word reading, sentence reading, and spontaneous speech. Auditory analyses were then carried out by the researcher. Results show four speaker-profiles: (1) /h/ is absent altogether; (2) /h/ is accurately realised; (3) /h/ is accurately realised in addition to regular occurrences of intrusive /h/; (4) only intrusive /h/ occurs. Although the speaking task has an influence on intra-speaker variability, intra-speaker consistency has been observed, with participants belonging to one of the above learner-profiles. Also of interest were the differences between men and women. These results suggest that different teaching strategies should be established to better suit the needs of the different profiles.