Do French-speaking learners simply omit the English /h/? - HAL-SHS - Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société Accéder directement au contenu
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2011

Do French-speaking learners simply omit the English /h/?

Résumé

It is commonly considered that French-speaking learners of English tend to drop /h/. In such cases, a hard vowel onset is often observed, suggesting the presence of a glottal stop preceding the vowel, whereas [h] is characterised by an open glottis. First, a set of recordings of the nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty" pronounced by 37 French students was acoustically analysed. The H2/H1 ratio (relative amplitude of the first two harmonics) at the onset of the first vowel in words beginning with /h/ was measured as an indication of voice quality. A comparison between cases where [h] was present and where it was not indicated that out of the 14 students who dropped /h/ at least once, 11 showed a higher H2/H1 ratio on average when /h/ was not pronounced, as expected. Second, glottal opening measurements were conducted on 9 test words beginning with /h/ or null consonant pronounced by a native speaker of French, using ePGG (external lighting and sensing photo-glottography). The results suggest more clearly than the H2/H1 ratio data that the glottis is closed when /h/ is dropped. A comparison of the two data sets shows the advantage of articulatory measurements such as ePGG when acoustic data alone do not provide sufficiently clear information on certain articulatory phenomena such as glottal aperture.

Domaines

Linguistique
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Dates et versions

halshs-00678035 , version 1 (11-03-2012)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-00678035 , version 1

Citer

Takeki Kamiyama, Barbara Kühnert, Jacqueline Vaissière. Do French-speaking learners simply omit the English /h/?. The 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS XVII), Aug 2011, Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR China. pp.1010-1013. ⟨halshs-00678035⟩
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