Interactions between native and non-native vowels in French-Danish contact: production training study

Abstract

Speakers who acquire a foreign language (L2) in adulthood (and even earlier), often experience major difficulties in producing non-native speech sounds, a phenomenon commonly known as having a foreign accent. These difficulties in non-native phonetic production are attributed to difficulties in distinguishing similar to native non-native sounds. Consequently, native sounds are used to produce similar non-native phones. Production training techniques whereby speakers receive feedback that compares their productions to that of native speakers’ have been shown to remediate these accents, even though there is important variability across speakers in their sensitivity to training. In this study, monolingual French speakers were trained to produce the Danish /o/ vowel that is similar to the French /o/. It explores, first, the individual-specific properties of French productions in relation to L2 production before and during training. Second, it examines the effects of training with Danish /o/ on the production of similar French /o/ vowel.