The pronunciation of the phone /h/ in Dutch and English by Belgian French-speaking learners of Dutch and English

Details

Supervisors

Philippe Hiligsmann

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation germaniques, à finalité didactique

Abstract

This dissertation centres around the pronunciation of the phone /h/ by Belgian French-speaking learners of Dutch and English. Since French native learners of Dutch and English appear to have trouble producing the phone /h/ at the correct location, the dissertation attempts to understand when omission and insertion of this phone occur in learners’ L2 speech by providing hypotheses. Since omission has been proven to occur independently from contexts of élision and liaison (Fayt & Heeren, 2018), the postulate is made that omission stems from L1-to-L2 transfers (Ellis, 2015). For insertion, the research proposes three hypotheses of possible loci of insertion. These include insertion in between clashing vowels, in minimal pairs and in front of words starting with a vowel and in which the letter h initiates the second syllable. To this end, pupils in their last year of secondary education have been asked to participate in a production and a perception task. The first part of the production task is composed of small nominal and verbal constituents while the second is composed of sentences. A question about their awareness is asked at the end of this task in order to investigate whether the results of the production task can be linked with awareness. Expectations are that the second part of the production task would yield higher occurrences of both omission and insertion. While the Dutch part of the results is in line with the expectations, this is not the case for the English part, which showcases a higher rate of omission in the first part. Insertion is more prevalent in the second part in both languages. As for the perception task, it shows high scores whether the test subjects perform well or badly on the production task, thus proving that perception precedes production. Nonetheless, this also proves that a low score on the production task is not necessarily due to bad perception. Clear-cut patterns are difficult to establish, both for omission and insertion. Additionally, the test subjects appear to insert [h] in loci unaccounted for in the hypotheses. Consequently, further research should be carried out in order to produce hypotheses that match the actual production of h-insertion among French-speaking learners of Dutch and English.