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.