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

Takeki Kamiyama (1, 2) , Barbara Kühnert (2) , Jacqueline Vaissière (2)

1 LAPS - Linguistique Anglaise, Psycholinguistique
2 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018

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, recordings of the nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty" of 37 French students were acoustically analysed. The H2/H1 ratio (i.e. 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. As expected, 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. Second, glottal opening measurements were conducted on 9 test words beginning with /h/ or null consonant produced 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. The data comparison 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.

Mots clés: French-speaking learners; English /h/; ePGG; H2/H1 ratio; glottal aperture

Domaines: Linguistique

Takeki Kamiyama, Barbara Kühnert, Jacqueline Vaissière. Do French-speaking learners simply omit the English /h/?. 2011. ⟨halshs-00679553⟩