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Auditory discrimination of French vowels by English speakers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Robert L. Politzer
Robert L. Politzer*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

The concept that the auditory discrimination of phonemic differences in a foreign language is influenced by the phonemic contrast of the native language is certainly not new. A considerable amount of research has been done in the general area of auditory discrimination and the results of such research tend to prove the more or less expected: Those sound differences which are utilized by the phonemic system of the native language are perceived more easily than those which do not correspond to a native phonemic opposition. The pedagogical applications of this principle are fairly obvious and far reaching. In the learning of a second language, particular emphasis must be placed on the development of auditory discrimination between sounds which have no acoustic counterpart or near relative in the system of the learner. Thus one of the prerequisites of the teaching of pronunciation is the comparison of the sound system of the native language with that of the language to be learned and the development of auditory discrimination drills involving the phonemes revealed as difficult by the comparison. Usually the auditory discrimination drills take the form of listening to and repeating minimal pairs differentiated by the difficult sounds.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , Fall 1961 , pp. 32 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1961

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References

1 For studies of the influence of the native system on auditory discrimination, see Polivanov, E., “La perception des sons d’une langue étrangère,” Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 4 (1931), pp. 79–96 Google Scholar, and Sapon, Stanley M. and Carroll, John B., “Discriminative Perception of Speech Sounds as a Function of Native language,” General Linguistics 3 (1958), pp. 62–73 Google Scholar.

2 On the problem of comparing sound systems for pedagogical purposes, see Lado, R., Linguistics across Cultures (Ann Arbor, 1957), pp. 9 ffGoogle Scholar.

3 For a description of this kind of teaching devices, see Politzer, R. L., Teaching French (Boston, 1960), pp. 51 ffGoogle Scholar.

4 For auditory discrimination and “pronunciation” tests based on this principle, see especially Lado, R., Annotated Bibliography for Teachers of English as a Foreign language (Washington, D.C., 1955), pp. 72 ff.Google Scholar, also idem, Measurement in English as a Foreign language (Ann Arbor, University Microfilms, 1951).

5 Politzer, Teaching French, pp. 50-51.

6 Miss Raymonde Dallaire, a native bilingual Canadian to whom the author of this article wishes to express his thanks and appreciation for her co-operation and help in this experiment. Since Miss Dallaire is a phonetician and linguist, she was able to produce the sound contrasts called for by the test even though some of them are not necessarily part of her own native French or English or are not really phonemic contrasts in her own French.

7 This item actually tests ã/a rather than ã/an. It repeats thus Item 51 and was included by mistake. To conform to the general pattern of the test it should, of course, test the same contrast that is involved in Item 27 and thus be replaced by an item like bon an/bↄnã/ vs. bonne âne /bↄnan/.

8 For the phonetic problems involved in the contrasts among French nasals and the loss of the phonemic contrast in Modern French, see Valdman, Albert, “Phonologic Structure and Social Factors in French: the vowel ‘un’,” French Review 33 (1959), pp. 153–161 Google Scholar.

9 For a brief discussion of the process of “auding,” see Muller, Theodore, “Auding Tests,” MLJ 43 (1959), pp. 185–187 Google Scholar.