Abstract
French speaking learners of English encounter persistent difficulty acquiring English [h], thus confusing words like eat and heat in both production and perception. We assess the hypothesis that the acoustic properties of [h] may render detection of this segment in the speech stream insufficiently reliable for second language acquisition. We use the mismatch negativity (MMN) in event-related potentials to investigate [h] perception in French speaking learners of English and native English controls, comparing both linguistic and non-linguistic conditions in an unattended oddball paradigm. Unlike native speakers, French learners of English elicit an MMN response only in the non-linguistic condition. Our results provide neurobiological evidence against the hypothesis that French speakers’ difficulties with [h] are acoustically based. They instead suggest that the problem is in constructing an appropriate phonological representation for [h] in the interlanguage grammar.
Highlights
In acquiring English as a second language, native speakers of French have been observed to encounter persistent difficulty with [h], a sound that is absent from the phonetic and phonemic inventories of French
In our analysis of overall event-related brain potentials (ERPs) patterns, we found that only deviant stimuli containing [h] elicited any reliable mismatch negativity (MMN) effects
The results obtained in this study show that French-speaking learners of English behave much like native English speakers in their perception of [h] in a non-linguistic task in that both groups elicited MMN and P3a components, demonstrating that they were able to detect the presence of [h] on deviant items when these were presented as noise bursts
Summary
In acquiring English as a second language, native speakers of French have been observed to encounter persistent difficulty with [h], a sound that is absent from the phonetic and phonemic inventories of French. French speakers who were very advanced English learners with training in English phonetics performed significantly worse than native speaker controls in discrimination of [h] vs Ø pairs (e.g., heat vs eat; LaCharité and Prévost, 1999). While a recent study by White et al (2015) suggests that attentional factors may have a role to play in successful discrimination of [h], it remains unclear what underlies French speakers’ errors, and why difficulties with [h] can persist, even among very advanced learners. We present neurobiological evidence from event-related brain potentials (ERPs) against this hypothesis, indicating that the difficulty for these learners lies in French Speakers and English [h]
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