Contribution of ultrasound visualisation to improving the production of the French /y/-/u/ contrast by four Japanese learners
Résumé
Ultrasound tongue imaging, which is the most non-invasive, safe, quick and low-cost technique used to observe tongue during speech, allows direct and real-time control over tongue position, and for this reason it was hypothesised that ultrasound visualisation may help L2 learners to acquire the necessary tongue positions. In order to test this assumption, a series of 3 training sessions using ultrasound image feedback were conducted with 4 Japanese-speaking learners of French. Here, we present data of two of these participants, as well as data from two control Japanese-speaking learners of French who did not receive ultrasound training. In order to inspect the differences in the articulation of [y] and [u], ultrasound and acoustic data were recorded at the same time. The corpus consisted of ten repetitions of (1) [y] and [u] in isolation, as well as [a], [i] and the Japanese [ɯ] (only in post-training), (2) alternation between [y] and [u], (3) disyllabic non-words CVCV where V is /y/ or /u/, and C is /p/, /t/ or /k/, (4) 28 real words and (5) four sentences. In this paper, only the results of isolated vowels are presented. Overall, both acoustic and articulatory data show improvement in the [y] - [u] contrast for these two Japanese learners who received the three 45mn ultrasound lessons: greater Euclidean distance between [y] and [u], lingual contours more separated after these three lessons. We didn't obtain these improvement results for the two control Japanese-learners, who didn't receive specific individual ultrasound lessons.
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