Perception of Canadian French rhotic vowels

Abstract

Some speakers of Canadian French produce words such as pneu, un, and coeur with rhotic-sounding vowels similar to English /ɹ/ (Dumas 1972). Articulatory imaging [Mielke (2011)] shows that they are produced with bunched and retroflex tongue postures and low F3, much like English /ɹ/. Nevertheless, native speakers typically are completely unaware of the difference, even when it is pointed out to them. We report a preliminary perception study of rhotic vowels. 7735 words with mid front round vowels were coded as “rhotic,” “non-rhotic,” or “ambiguous” by two listeners: a French-English bilingual from eastern Ontario and an American English speaker. The bilingual coded 0.3% as rhotic (vs. 10.0% for the anglophone) and 7.3% as ambiguous (vs. 8.9%). Logistic regressions show that the anglophone relied on F3 to distinguish rhotic+ambiguous tokens from non-rhotic tokens, while the bilingual weighted several cues about equally, including F1 cues to diphthongization, which can co-occur with rhoticity. Results will be presented from an ongoing AX discrimination task experiment involving rhotic, non-rhotic, and ambiguous vowel tokens, with francophone, bilingual, and anglophone listeners from the Ottawa-Gatineau region, Paris, France, and Raleigh, North Carolina.