Author manuscript, published in PPLC13: Phonetics, phonology, languages in contact. Contact varieties,
multilingualism, second language learning, Paris: France (2013), p.25-28
Foreign accents and native sloppiness:
The role of individual native production on non-native vowel pronunciation
Natalia Kartushina, Ulrich Hans Frauenfelder
University of Geneva, Switzerland
Introduction
Speakers who acquired a second language (L2) late as adolescents generally produce speech that
is marked by an accent from their native language (L1). The dominant theoretical perspectives
(Best, 1995; Flege, 1995) attribute such accents to deficient L2 perception caused by L1
phonology. However, certain studies (Hattori & Iverson, 2010; Peperkamp & Bouchon, 2011)
showing no correlation between L2 perception and L2 production challenge such a causal
relation. This study aims to evaluate the explanatory role of L2 perception for L2 production and
to explore alternative explanations arising from the L1 phonological system, as for example, the
role of L1 production in the learning of French vowel contrast /ø/-/œ/ by Spanish speakers.
French and Spanish vowel inventories differ significantly. The Spanish phonological system
contains five oral monophthongal vowels (the three ‘point’ vowels /i/, /a/, /u/ that define the
three extremes, and two middle vowels /e/, /o/) that are common to many languages, including
French (Maddieson, 1984). The French vowel system (for oral vowels) is composed of ten
monophthongal vowels, six of which form three height contrastive pairs (Vaissière, 2006). One
of them, the frontal mi-open/mi-closed /ø/-/œ/ rounded contrast, is of particular interest since
Spanish lacks both the vowel height distinction and frontal rounded vowels. According to the
Full Transfer (FT) model (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996) the L1 system is transferred and used to
process or ‘filter’ L2 sounds (Archibault, 1998; Trubetzkoy, 1939). Therefore, in our case,
Spanish five-vowel-system is used to process French vowels. Although it remains unclear which
properties of the native phonological system actually transfer to L2, L2 perception models seem
to favor the transfer of native phonetic features (Major, 2008). This transfer is conceptualised as
the transfer of L1 phonological space and measured by using productions averaged across groups
of native speakers (Escudero & Vasiliev, 2011). Accordingly, for L1 Spanish speakers learning
French, the French /ø/ and/œ/ vowels fall into ‘empty’ regions of the L1 space. The perceptionbased models predict that both of these French vowels will be classified as ‘new’ since there is
no close L1 equivalent to either. Therefore, they will be non-assimilated to native categories and
hence relatively well perceived. L2 production performance is further expected to depend upon
this L2 perception performance based on the mapping between L1 and L2 phonological spaces.
In computing this mapping, most previous studies have relied on a L1 referential phonological
space that does not take into account the individual variability in production of the native vowels.
However, it is known that there is large variability or inconsistency in production of the same
phoneme across L1 speakers. Some speakers have compact realizations (a compact acoustic
space), whereas others do not (a distributed space) (Perkell et al., 2004). Can such L1
articulation differences (compact or not) account for some of the variability in L2 production
accuracy of ‘new’ L2 contrasts? We propose that speakers transfer their distributions of native
Author manuscript, published in PPLC13: Phonetics, phonology, languages in contact. Contact varieties,
multilingualism, second language learning, Paris: France (2013), p.25-28
phonetic realizations into L2 space. If so, the compactness of the L1 space should have an effect
on L2 production accuracy of ‘new’ L2 vowels. In particular, if individual L1 space is more
widely occupied as compared to the average L1 referential distribution, then L2 ‘new’ sounds are
more likely to fall within or close to the borders of the L1 phonemes and less likely into ‘empty’
spaces, thus affecting L2 classification/assimilation/processing. Accordingly, we predict that SP
speakers with more compact L1 productions (high compactness) produce FR /ø-oe/ vowels more
accurately than speakers whose L1 space is more distributed (low compactness).
Method
To examine the role of L2 perception and L1 compactness on L2 production, we accessed
perception (five-forced-choice identification task) and production (vowel naming and repetition
tasks) of the French contrast /ø-œ/ in fourteen Spanish pupils (mean age 16) studying L2 French
at a Spanish school in Plasencia, Spain. For the five-forced-choice identification task, French
perceptually closed /o/, /O/, /a/ vowels were used with the target /ø/, /œ/ vowels. To avoid an
orthographical bias (Bassetti, 2008), the participants had to identify the isolated vowels using
picture labels. In order to tap into the acoustic-phonetic and phonological representations in L2
production, two production tasks, repetition and vowel naming, were used, respectively.
Repetition involves receiving a model and imitating it immediately on the basis of the acoustic
pattern they have just heard (Goldinger, 1998). On the other hand, vowel naming involves no
sensory input, but requires the recovery of internal L2 phonological representation on the basis
of pictures. The participants’ native reading productions were also analysed for compactness in
L1 acoustic space using the formula for the area of the ellipse A=xyπ, where x is the F1 standard
deviation and y is the F2 standard deviation. The five compactness scores obtained for the five
SP vowels were summed to form one L1 compactness score. In addition, to construct the target
L2 acoustic spaces, five native French speakers reading two lists of the ten French sentences
which contained one isolated vowel, as in “Je prononce /ø/ comme dans ceux” ( [Ʒe pronõs ø
kom dã sø], “I pronounce /ø/ as in those”) were recorded. Isolated vowels were extracted from
the final words; the first two formants were considered for the acoustic analyses. In total, we
obtained twenty native French /ø/-/œ/ vowels: 2 vowels * 5 different speakers * 2 tokens per
speaker. L2 production accuracy in repetition and naming tasks was measured by taking the
distance score (DS) between each individual L2 vowel and the native French speakers’ acoustic
space for this vowel represented by F1 and F2 distributions.
Results
The perception results showed that both French vowels were equally poorly identified (40% and
34% of correct identifications, chance level is at 25%, moderate perception is at 50%). As for the
production, both vowels were pronounced better in the repetition task than in naming task and
the results for the two tasks were strongly correlated (r=.69, p<.01and r=.61, p<.05 for /œ/ and
/ø/ vowels respectively). Overall, French /ø/ vowel was pronounced more accurately than French
/œ/ vowel. The results of linear regression analyses revealed that L2 perception had no effect on
L2 production accuracy in both production tasks and for both vowels. In contrast, L1
compactness predicted production accuracies for both vowels in the repetition task (F (2, 135) =
8.22, p<.001; F (2, 134) = 6.34, p<.05 for /ø/ and /œ/ vowels respectively) and for the /ø/ vowel
in the naming task (F (2, 83) = 3.4, p<.05) see Figure 1. Post-hoc analysis showed a significant
Author manuscript, published in PPLC13: Phonetics, phonology, languages in contact. Contact varieties,
multilingualism, second language learning, Paris: France (2013), p.25-28
correlation between the L1 compactness score (A) and the L2 production accuracy (DS) in the
repetition task. Additionally, L2 compactness was also measured and found to be correlated
significantly with the L2 production accuracy for both vowels and both tasks.
Conclusions
Overall the L2 productions were close to the target native French vowels, whereas perception
performance on these vowels was relatively poor. This dissociation between participants’
performance on the two types of tasks, together with the absence of an effect of L2 perception on
L2 production, strongly suggests that production of non-native ‘new’ vowels is not mediated by
L2 perception. In contrast, the compactness of L1 productions predicted L2 production accuracy.
More specifically, speakers with more compact L1 productions produced L2 vowels more
accurately than those whose L1 space was less compact. This result points to the transfer of L1
individual phonetic realisations into L2 space. Another finding – the superiority of the repetition
over naming performance - suggests that L2 speakers can efficiently repeat L2 phonetic patterns,
but their L2 phonological representations used in naming are still fragile and imprecise. In sum,
our study suggests that L2 accents are determined by the L1 phonology but modulated by the
individual production distribution of the native phonemes.
***
*
*
Figure 1 Box plot for production accuracy (DS) as function of the L1 space compactness (high
vs. low) for repetition and naming tasks; the band inside the box indicates the second quartile
(the median), the bottom and top of the box are the first and third quartiles
Author manuscript, published in PPLC13: Phonetics, phonology, languages in contact. Contact varieties,
multilingualism, second language learning, Paris: France (2013), p.25-28
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