Chung, Rhonda (2016) Can Anglophone learners aurally distinguish between the passé composé and imparfait in French? Masters thesis, Concordia University.
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Abstract
Anglophone French learners’ problems acquiring the passé composé (PC; il a parl/e/) and imparfait (IMP; il parl/E/) are well-documented in SLA literature. Explanations range from inadequate pedagogical material to incongruencies in the tense/aspect/modality of both languages. However, can learners actually perceive the acoustic differences inherent in these two constructions? The largest verb group in French (-ER verbs) was targeted as it produces regular morphophonemic inflections (/e/ and /E/) when conjugated in the PC and IMP, respectively. However, this /e-E/ distinction has undergone phonological neutralization in certain French variants, resulting in greater production of /e/ over /E/, which may lead to inaccurate L2 perception and production.
A one-shot experiment comprised of four tasks tested whether Anglophone L2 French learners could distinguish between the /e-E/ contrast in: a transcription task of high frequency verbs, two phoneme discrimination tasks of minimal pairs in nonwords and in sentential contexts, and a grammaticality task evaluating lexical bias. All speech samples were judged by speakers of Quebecois French, where the /e-E/ distinction remains contrastive. Results revealed that participants: overwhelmingly transcribed /e/ with greater accuracy than /E/; perceived /e/ better than /E/ in the discrimination tasks for non-words; perceived the IMP where the PC was used (despite the auxiliary in the latter); and demonstrated an aspectual lexical bias in differentiating between the PC and IMP in the grammaticality task. These results suggest that French learners’ inability to aurally perceive the /e-E/ distinction inherent in the PC and IMP may further complicate past tense acquisition.
| Divisions: | Concordia University > Faculty of Arts and Science > Education |
|---|---|
| Item Type: | Thesis (Masters) |
| Authors: | Chung, Rhonda |
| Institution: | Concordia University |
| Degree Name: | M.A. |
| Program: | Applied Linguistics |
| Date: | April 2016 |
| Thesis Supervisor(s): | Cardoso, Walcir |
| Keywords: | L2 perception, passé composé, imparfait, past tense acquisition, Anglophone FSL, Quebecois French, phonological neutralization, epsilon, /e-E/, French mid-vowels, loi de position, Aspect Hypothesis, tense and aspect. |
| ID Code: | 981066 |
| Deposited By: | RHONDA CHUNG |
| Deposited On: | 31 May 2016 19:33 |
| Last Modified: | 18 Jan 2018 17:52 |
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