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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2023

Are French learners’ /r/s in good shape? An ultrasound tongue imaging study of English /r/

Résumé

The English rhotic is as well-known for its challenging acquisition as it is for its intricate articulation. Acoustically equivalent /r/ sounds can be produced with various degrees of bunched and retroflex tongue shapes, that is, both tip-down and tip-up. Coarticulation partly explains the preference for one type or the other because tip-down shapes are more compatible with close front vowels than tip-down ones. However, coarticulation alone cannot account for why some native speakers develop both tongue shapes, while others use exclusively tip-up or tip-down patterns. This study considers the hypothesis put forward by Heyne et al. (2020) that rhotic and non-rhotic accents may trigger the acquisition of different lingual strategies. Indeed, while previous research has found higher proportions of tip-down shapes in rhotic Englishes than in non-rhotic Englishes, speakers who use both tongue shapes largely prefer tip-up shapes in prevocalic /r/ and tip-down shapes in postvocalic /r/. Given that only rhotic speakers pronounce postvocalic /r/, they may be more prone to developing tip-down configurations than non-rhotic speakers. Although acquiring /r/ as a non-native sound adds an extra level of complexity, learners’ lingual gestures have received very little attention. French learners, for instance, are completely unfamiliar with the post-alveolar approximant in their native language. Apart from infrequent deletions or substitutions for the more familiar [w], French learners generally produce [ɹ] in English L2. However, as pronunciation is rarely addressed in language classes, explicit instruction is unlikely to affect their lingual strategies. This, together with the fact that both rhotic and non-rhotic accents are observed among French learners, invites us to consider their productions of /r/ and to examine the influence of rhoticity on lingual gesture acquisition. We collected ultrasound tongue images from 12 French learners of English with a rhotic (6) and a non-rhotic (6) accent. Participants were selected for their accent consistency based on a set of 12 sentences designed for that purpose. For the present study, subjects read 20 monosyllabic words in isolation, in which prevocalic /r/ occurred before /i:, ɪ, e, æ, ɑː, ɒ, ʌ, ɜː, ɔː, u:/ and postvocalic /r/ after /ɪ, e, ɑː, ɜː, ɔː/. Each word was repeated 3 times in a randomised list. Ultrasound frames of /r/ productions were visually labelled as tip-up or tip-down. Following our hypothesis, the only participant to use exclusively tip-down shapes was a rhotic speaker. However, while other rhotic speakers showed a preference for tip-down articulations in postvocalic /r/, they did not necessarily extend it to prevocalic contexts. Interestingly, learners intuitively developed a range of tongue shape patterns similar to native speakers and they seemed to be ruled by the same articulatory constraints (i.e., tip-down gestures preferred in postvocalic /r/ and surrounding close front vowels). The emergence of native-like patterns for a phonetically complex non-native sound remains a topic for future studies, but the results nevertheless suggest that articulatory patterns for English /r/ are strongly constrained by mechanical and perhaps by physiological (individual) factors.

Domaines

Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-04138988 , version 1 (23-06-2023)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04138988 , version 1

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Alice Léger, Hannah King, Emmanuel Ferragne. Are French learners’ /r/s in good shape? An ultrasound tongue imaging study of English /r/. PAC 2023 – Spoken English varieties: interfaces and multidimensional approaches, Apr 2023, Paris, France. ⟨hal-04138988⟩
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