L1-L2 Interference: The Case of Final Devoicing of French Voiced Fricatives in Final Position by German Learners

Abstract

This work is dealing with a case of L1-L2 interference in language learning. The Germans learning French as a second language frequently produce unvoiced fricatives in word-final position instead of the expected voiced fricatives. We investigated the production of French fricatives for 16 non-native (8 beginner-and 8 advanced-learners) and 8 native speakers, and designed auditory feedback to help them realize the right voicing feature. The productions of all speakers were categorized either as voiced or unvoiced by experts. The same fricatives were also evaluated by non-experts in a perception experiment targeting VCs. We compare the ratings by experts and non-experts with the feature-based analysis. The ratio of locally unvoiced frames in the consonantal segment and also the ratio between consonantal duration and V1 duration were measured. The acoustic cues of neighboring sounds and pitch-based features play a significant role in the voicing judgment. As expected, we found that beginners face more difficulties to produce voiced fricatives than advanced learners. Also, the production becomes easier for the learners, especially for the beginners, if they practice repetition after a native speaker. We use these findings to design and develop feedback via speech analysis/synthesis technique TD-PSOLA using the learner's own voice.

Acoustic impact of the gradual glottal abduction degree on the production of fricatives: A numerical study

“…However, this requires to reduce the duration of the fricative, since B is very unstable. Our acoustic measurements 45 show that some French speakers (approximately one third for postalveolar fricatives) sustain voicing for the whole fricative even in a final position. This corresponds to one of these two strategies.…”

“…Our simulations give a new point of view about strategies available to implement the voice/unvoiced contrasts of fricatives. Here we exploit the results of our simulations together with the observations of French speakers and German learners of French 45 . In this previous work dedicated to language learning we recorded sentences with voiced fricatives in a word final position uttered by French and German speakers, and the same words (in an isolated condition) by French speakers to investigate voicing without the influence of the initial vowel of the next word.…”

End-to-End Acoustic Feedback in Language Learning for Correcting Devoiced French Final-Fricatives

“…Therefore, to facilitate the perception and production of fricatives of the learners, we propose a novel framework that incorporates a correction method which substitutes the erroneous devoiced fricative with voiced one using TD-PSOLA [10], and also the energy of the replacement fricative was adjusted w.r.t. the preceding vowels of the learner and teacher.…”

“…The voicing during the fricative segment is found as the dominant cue for the listeners' voicing decision [14], though the scope of this paper is beyond the debate of incompleteness of voicing neutralization [15]. The fricative duration cue plays a significant perceptual role to distinguish between voiced and voiceless fricatives, and also lengthening the duration of the preceding vowel of the word-final fricative is an effective technique to produce a voiced fricative [16,10]. Low-frequency energy was included as a successful measure of voicing during the frication by a series of works [17,18]; here a spectrum over the whole frication noise was computed, and then the amplitude of the components below 500 Hz was measured.…”

Glottal Opening and Strategies of Production of Fricatives

“…These observations open new perspectives for understanding the strategies available to implement the voice/unvoiced contrasts of fricatives, or for explaining some phenomena, such as the final fricative devoicing [11][12][13]. In order to complete the numerical observations, this paper aims at experimentally verifying the existence of such an unstable zone in fricatives, and also the existence of these potential different strategies.…”