Perception of L2 production by L1 speakers of different dialectal backgrounds: the case of Japanese-speaking learners' /u/ perceived by French and Quebec native speakers
Résumé
The high back rounded /u/ of Parisian French (PF) is characterized by a concentration of energy in the low frequency zones (< 1000 Hz) due to the grouping of the first two formants, while Quebec French (QF) has a "lax" variant [ʊ] in closed syllables (as in “soupe”), with its F2 amounting to 1000 to 1100 Hz (Martin 2002). Japanese-speaking learners of French (JSL) tend to produce French /u/ with high F2 as in Japanese /u/, which in turn tends to be perceived by PF listeners as /ø/. Do QF listeners show different behavior because of their lax variant of /u/? Our perception experiment using 18 tokens each of /u y ø/ produced by 5 JSL showed that the 16 PF listeners examined perceived those stimuli of /u/ with F2 between 1000 and 1100 Hz as /ø/ and /u/ almost equally often, but considered as very poor exemplars of either of them. By contrast, the 16 QF listeners tested identified the same stimuli of /u/ almost always as /u/ with a better goodness rating than NF listeners'. These findings suggest that native speakers' judgment about non-native speakers' production might depend on the native dialect of the listener.