Anova Summary For Cantonese Participants

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Once the onset and the offset of the vowels were located, the vowel formant measures were taken using PRAAT 5.3.42 (Boersma and Weenink 2013). The first through sixth formant frequencies were estimated on the vowel portion using LPC analysis with a series of overlapping Gaussian windows with duration of 50 ms with a 2.5 ms step size points. These data were summarized at points 5%, 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 90%, and 95% of the way through each vowel; measurements that were outside the expected values for F1 or F2 were re-measured by hand. For the purpose of the present study, only the measurements at the mid-point (the 50% mark) of the vowel was used, thereby reducing the impact of different phonological environments since the transitional segments during the onset and offset of the vowel

2.5 Vowel normalization

Vowel normalization has been recognized as a necessary step in the acoustic analysis of vowels to suppress the systematic effects of anatomical and physiological differences on formant features (Adank, Smits, & van Hout, 2004; Wassink, 2006). In a study of bilingual (L1-E) and trilingual (L1-C) speech, the goal is to preserve phonetic variation while reducing the anatomical and physiological differences between speakers. Although only female participants were recruited for this study, normalization remains an important step since participants’ height, and thus, their vocal tract lengths, varied considerably between speakers. The "Bark Difference Metric" (Traunmüller1997) normalization procedure was selected for this data set because only two vowels in English and three vowels in French and Cantonese vowel systems were measured, rather than speakers’ entire vowel systems.

3. RESULTS

3.1 Between-Group Analyses.

The following section describes the results from the analysis of vowel production by the two groups of native speakers, Cantonese and (Canadian) English. Table 3.1 shows the mean group Bark-normalized values and their standard deviations across both groups of speakers for F1 and F2, L1-C and L1-E, organized by vowel. A visual representation of this data is illustrated in Figure 3.1: on the x-axis are the mean Bark-normalized values for F2; on the y-axis are the mean Bark-normalized values for F1.

Table 3.1 Group Mean and Standard Deviation for Bark Converted Formant Values.

Native language

Target Language

Vowel

F1 Mean

F1 SD

F2 Mean

F2 SD

English

English

I

3.512109

0.599346

14.86559

0.392271

English

French

I

3.443572

0.66065

14.54271

0.545011

Cantonese

English

I

3.856513

0.586509

15.06081

0.529637

Cantonese

French

I

3.861126

0.668932

14.8946

0.59922

Cantonese

Cantonese

I

3.762546

0.781197

15.0097

0.562093

English

English

U

3.717014

0.503617

11.11892

2.098611

English

French

U

3.514821

0.493636

9.976673

2.004135

Cantonese

English

U

3.954021

0.559967

11.01812

1.774022

Cantonese

French

U

3.76699

0.575542

9.916794

1.981801

Cantonese

Cantonese

U

5.195927

1.026934

8.993446

1.108218

English

French

Y

3.408149

0.578523

13.65098

0.810077

Cantonese

French

Y

3.816986

0.599069

13.4464

1.323653

Cantonese

Cantonese

Y

3.892498

0.518532

13.64491

0.591085

For each group, the normalized vowel means are plotted with error bars representing one standard deviation from the mean of F1 or F2 measured at mid-point. Based on visual inspection of the graph, five patterns are evident between the two groups : (1) along both dimensions, F1 and F2, the production of Cantonese /u/ is has a much higher value than that for English /u/ and French /u/, produced by both groups of participants; (2) the production of Cantonese /y/ has a higher F1 relative to its’ unrounded counterpart /i/; however, the production of /y/ in French by both groups, L1-C and L1-E, are both lower when compared to /i/ in French; (3) along the F1 dimension, the productions of all English and French vowels productions by the L1-C group are relatively higher than that for the L1-E group; (4) along the F2 dimension, the productive vowel space for L1-E speakers is smaller than that of the L1-C speakers , and finally; (5) for both groups of speakers, the productive vowel space is smallest for all speakers when speaking English and largest for the L1-C Cantonese productions.

Figure 3.1: This figure represents the mean Bark-Converted Formant Values by each target language (Cantonese, English and French). Three vowels are plotted for French and Cantonese /i y u/, and two vowels are plotted for English /i u/. Each vowel is represented in a different shape and the error-bar surrounding the shape is one standard deviation from the mean. The colour of the data point represents the native language of the speaker, Cantonese or English.

may1-meanplots.jpeg

Three independent variables were considered in the statistical analysis of these data: (1) the speaker's language background (native Canadian English speaker or Native Cantonese speaker), (2) the target vowel (/i/, /y/, or /u/), and (3) the target language being used (Cantonese, English or French). The dependent variables were the mean normalized value for each vowel in F1 and F2. The means for each vowel for each target language were based on approximately 30 productions by each speaker (15 words per vowel, produced two times); any variation in number of tokens was due to the aforementioned participant errors. An examination of each of the speaker's productions of the three vowels in all three languages was completed to determine that the measurements could be summarized and discussed in terms of mean values. These values are further discussed in section 2.3, Individual & Within-Group Analysis. For each vowel token, the formant values were based on the F1 and F2 value taken at the vowel mid-point and then these values were normalized using the "Bark-Difference Metric" normalization procedure (Traunmüller, 1997) described above. The group means for F1 and F2 of each vowel are presented in Table 3. To investigate group differences in mean values of the vowels, a repeated-measures ANOVA was used. Conducting a single ANOVA that includes all speakers was not possible since the L1-C group are represented in Cantonese, English and French, whereas the L1-E speakers were represented in English and French, violating the assumptions of independence for an ANOVA. The two questions investigated in this study were for the group analysis were: (1) Are the high vowels produced in the native languages for each group of speakers different with respect to F1 and F2?; (2) If these differences exist in the L1, are these same differences reflected in their productions of the same vowels in Canadian French?

3.1.1 Are the high vowels produced in the native languages for each group of speakers different with respect to F1 and F2?

To investigate mean formant values, a repeated-measure ANOVA was conducted in R, where the repeated measure was the vowel formant (F1 or F2), and the independent variables were vowel (/i y u /) and Native Language (Canadian English or Cantonese). For the F1 values, the repeated-measure ANOVA resulted in a main effect for vowel [F(2, 570) =82.87, p<.001], a main effect for Native Language [F(1, 570) = 107.19 p<0.001], and an interaction between vowel and Native Language [F(1, 570) =41.58, p<.001]. ). For the F2 values, the repeated-measure ANOVA resulted in a main effect for vowel [F(2,570) = 926.03, p<.001], a main effect for Native language [F(1, 570) =68.46, p<.001], and an interaction between vowel and Native Language [F(1, 570) =103.84, p<.001].

For the F1 values, post-hoc Tukey tests revealed that the L1-E and the L1-C were significantly different in their production of /u/for F1 [p<.0001] and F2 [p<.0001]. With respect to F1 for /i/, the p-value was slightly beyond the level significance [p =0.056], and no main effect was found for F2. The L1-C group produced higher F1 values for /u/. For the F1 values, the results indicated that there was a significant difference between the /u/ productions for these groups in their respective native languages. For the F2 values, there was only a significant different between Cantonese /u/ and English /u/.

Taken together, the results from the analysis of the productions of F1 and F2 revealed that although the targeted vowels are typically represented by the same phoneme, significant acoustic differences exist across these two languages for high vowels, particularly for the vowel /u/.

3.1.2 If these differences exist in the L1, are these same differences reflected in their productions of the same vowels in Canadian French?

To investigate mean formant values, a repeated-measure ANOVA was conducted in R where the repeated measure was the vowel formant (F1 or F2), and the independent variables were vowel (/i y u /) and Native Language (Canadian English or Cantonese) and French as the spoken language. For the F1 values, the repeated-measure ANOVA resulted in a main effect for Native Language [F (1, 778) =25.55, p<.001], and no effect for vowel and for a Native Language and vowel interaction. For the F2 values, the repeated-measure ANOVA resulted in a main effect for vowel [F (2,778) = 2.686, p<.001], and no effect for Native Language and for a Native Language and vowel interaction.

For the F1 values, post-hoc Tukey tests revealed that L1-E and the L1-C were significantly different in their production of /u/ [p<.01] and /i/ [p<.00001] for F1. There were no main effects found for the F2 dimensions for these vowels. The L1-C group produced higher F1 values for both vowels (/i/ and /u/). Taking the post-hoc results into account, the results from the analysis of the productions of F1 and F2 revealed that although the targeted vowels are typically represented by the same phoneme, significant acoustic differences exist across the dimension of vowel height (F1) for these two languages across for the high vowels, particularly for the vowel /u/.

3.2 Individual & Within-Group Analysis.

The following section describes the results from the analysis of vowel production by individual participants who were part of two groups of native speakers, Cantonese and (Canadian) English. Figures 4 and 5 illustrate the normalized values for L1-C group and L1-E group, respectively. On the x-axis of these figures are the mean Bark-normalized values for F2; on the y-axis of these figures are the mean Bark-normalized values for F1 [1] .

From a visual inspection of Figure 4.0, for individuals in the L1-C group, the following patterns are found: (1) for all participants, the production of Cantonese-/u/ is much lower than that for the productions of /u/ in English and in French; (2) the production of /y/ in both Cantonese and French are very close together for both F1 and F2 for participants CP5, CP6 and CP7, but they appear distinct for both CP10 and CP11 on both dimensions for CP11 and for only the F1 dimension only for CP10; (3) the vowels produced by CP5 are, on average, much lower for F1 than those for other group members; (4) CP10 seems to have the most restricted vowel space on the F1 dimension , in contrast to CP11 , who seems to have the most vowel dispersion on the F1 dimension.

As for the L1-E participants, the following patterns were observed: (1) by and large, the production of French have lower F2 values, and are thus are produced more back when compared to the production of English vowels by the participants; (2) the production of English-/u/ by EP2 has a much higher F1 value in comparison to the production of the vowels produced by this participant; (3) the vowel space for EP8 is higher along the F1 dimension for all vowels; (4) the production of French-/i/ by EP3 is much lower on the F1 dimension when compared to this participant’s production of English-/i/, which is interesting because for all other participants, the two productions of /i/ (in English and in French) are very close together on both the F1 and F2 dimensions.

Figure 4: Mean-Bark-Converted Values by Individual: Cantonese participants

Figure 5.0: Mean-Bark-Converted Values by Individual: English participants

3.2.1 Are the high vowels produced by each speaker different with respect to F1 and F2?

To investigate mean formant values, a repeated-measure ANOVA was conducted where the repeated measure was the vowel formant (F1 or F2), and the independent variables were vowel (/i y u /), Language being Spoken and Participant. A summary of these results is found in Table 3.2.1A and Table 2.3.1B, which are for Cantonese participants and English participants, respectively.

Table 3.2.1A: ANOVA Summary for Cantonese Participants: F1 (red), F2 (blue)

F1

Participant

Main Effect: Speaking Language

Main Effect: vowel

Main effect: Interaction [vowel and Speaking Language]

CP5

[F(1, 145)=17.34, p<0.001]

[F(2, 145)=14.39,  p<0.001]

[F(2,145)=27.81,  p<0.001]

CP6

[F(1, 115)=15.96, p<0.001]

[F(2, 115)=16.93, p<0.001]

[F(2,115)=30.83,  p<0.001]

CP7

[F(1, 130)=27.53, p<0.001]

[F(2, 130)=15.02, p<0.001]

[F(2, 130)=39.69,  p<0.001]

CP10

[F(1, 143)=22.82, p<0.001]

[F(2, 143)=19.00, p<0.001]

[F(2,143)=15.45,  p<0.001]

CP11

[F(1, 156)=32.65, p<0.001]

[F(2, 156)=11.90, p<0.001]

[F(2, 156)=32.00, p<0.001]

F2

CP5

N/A

[F(2,145)=388.565, p<0.001]

N/A

CP6

N/A

[F(2, 115)=293.700,  p<0.001]

[F(2, 115)=2.610, p<.0.05]

CP7

N/A

[F(2, 130)=162.197 p<0.001]

N/A

CP10

[F(2, 143)=7.238, p<0.01]

[F(2, 143)=234.415 p<0.001]

[F(3, 143)=9.690, p<0.001]

CP11

[F(1, 156)=27.592., p<0.001]

[F(2, 156)=398.509 p<0.001]

[F(2, 156)=6.625, p<0.01]

Table 3.2.1B: ANOVA Summary for English Participants: F1 (red), F2 (blue)

F1

Participant Number

Main Effect: Speaking Language

Main Effect: vowel

Main effect: Interaction [vowel and Speaking Language]

EP2

[F(1, 122)=34.182, p<0.001]

[F(2, 122)=9.081, p<0.001]

[F(1,122)=27.780, p<0.001]

EP3

N/A

[F(2, 110)=6.583,  p<0.01]

N/A

EP4

[F(1, 140)=2.807, p<0.05]

N/A

N/A

EP8

N/A

[F(2, 126)=5.170 p<0.01]

N/A

EP9

[F(1, 117)=3.710, p<0.05]

[F(2,117)=16.628, p<0.001]

N/A

F2

EP2

[F(1, 122)=3.662, p<.10]

[F(2, 122)=162.099 p<0.001]

[F(1,122)=7.996, p<0.01]

EP3

N/A

[F(2, 110)=43.704 p<0.001]

N/A

EP4

[F(1, 140)=8.309, p<.01]

[F(2, 140)=247.801 p<0.001]

[F(1,140)=17.779,  p<0.001]

EP8

N/A

[F(2, 126)=132.499 p<0.001]

[F(1,126)=3.378,  p<0.05]

EP9

N/A

[F(2, 117)=209.024, p<0.001]

N/A

3.2.2 If these differences exist in the L1, are these same differences reflected in their productions of the same vowels in Canadian French?

For the Cantonese participants, post-hoc Tukey tests were performed in order to analyze the interaction between Speaking Language (Cantonese and French) and vowel /i y u/. For all Cantonese participants (CP5, CP6, CP7, C10 and CP11), these tests demonstrated a main effect for the F1 dimension between the production of between Cantonese /u/-French /u/ [p<.0001]. For CP10, a main effect was also found the F2 dimension between the production of between Cantonese /u/-French /u/ [p<.0001]. For CP11, a main effect for the F2 dimension was found between Cantonese /y/-French /y/ [p<.005].

For the English participants, post-hoc Tukey tests were performed in order to analyze the interaction between Speaking Language (English and French) and vowel /i u/. For EP2 and EP4, these tests demonstrated a main effect for the F1 dimension between the production of between English /u/-French u/ [p<.0001]. For EP2, a main effect was also found for the F2 dimension between English /u/-French u/ [p<.0001]. For EP8, a main effect was only found on the F1 dimension between English /u/-French u/ [p<.0001]

The results from the analysis of the productions of F1 and F2 revealed that although the targeted vowel /u/ is typically represented by the same phoneme (International Phonetic Association, 2005); significant acoustic differences exist across the three languages, particularly for the F1 dimension in Cantonese. Moreover, the results demonstrate that that the production of /y/ was different for only one participant (CP11) on the F2 dimension, and no main effects were found for the production of /i/ across all participants.

3.2.3 (3) For the L1-C group, is there evidence of language transfer from the L2 (Canadian English) to their L3 (Canadian French)?

To investigate mean formant values, a repeated-measure ANOVA was conducted where the repeated measure was the vowel formant (F1 or F2), and the independent variables were vowel (/i u /), Speaking Language (English, French) and Participant (C5, C6, C7, C10, C11). A summary of these results is found in Table 3.2.3.

Table 3.2.3: ANOVA Summary for L2-L3 Language Transfer in

Cantonese Participants: F1 (red), F2 (blue)

F1

Participant Number

Main Effect: Speaking Language

Main Effect: vowel

Main effect: Interaction [vowel and Speaking Language]

CP5

N/A

[F(2, 132)=6.883, p<0.01]

[F(1,132)=3.191, p<0.05]

CP6

N/A

[F(2, 120)=3.612,  p<0.05]

N/A

CP7

N/A

N/A

N/A

CP10

[F(1, 131)=3.232, p<0.05]

N/A

N/A

CP11

N/A

N/A

[F(1,44)=5.536, p<0.05]

F2

CP5

[F(1, 132)=3.259, p<.05]

[F(2, 132)=165.737 p<0.001]

[F(1,132)=15.972, p<0.001]

CP6

N/A

[F(2, 120)=198.297 p<0.001]

N/A

CP7

N/A

[F(2, 130)=125.777 p<0.001]

N/A

CP10

N/A

[F(2, 131)=111.671, p<0.001]

N/A

CP11

[F(1, 144)=13.703, p<.001]

[F(2, 144)=13.703, p<0.001]

[F(1, 144)=7.384, p<.01]

Evidence of language transfer was assessed by performing the post-hoc Tukey tests, which identified significantly different F1 and F2 values for the interaction between vowel /i u/ and the Speaking language (English or French). Differences in production between vowels of English and French by Cantonese speakers were only found for two participants, CP5 and CP11. For CP5, the Tukey tests revealed a main effect for English/u/-French/u/ along the F1 dimension [p<.01], and the F2 dimension [p<.0001]. For CP11, the Tukey tests revealed no main effect for English/u/-French/u/along the F1 dimension, but there was a main effect on the F2 dimension [p<.001].

3.3.4 (4) For the L1-E group, do the Canadian French productions of /y/ support the hypotheses postulated by Flege’s (1995) Speech Learning Model (SLM)?

The predictions of the SLM suggest that if the L2 learner has made a new category for the vowel, they will produce it differently than the native vowel or non-native vowel for which assimilation may occur; in the cases of this theory, if assimilation occurred, /y/ would be assimilated to /u/ (Gottfried, 1984; Flege, 1987; Levy, 2009; Levy & Law II, 2010, ).

A visual inspection of Figure 5.0 shows that the production of French-/y/ by L1-E speakers in French is noticeable different, in both F1 and F2 dimensions, when compared to the productions of /u/ in both English and French. This suggests that all L2 speakers of French have successfully created the new category for /y/, supporting the hypotheses of both theories. In fact, the productions of /y/ seem to be much closer to the productions of /i/ than to /u/ on the F2 dimension, suggesting a native-French-like pattern for the production of /y/. A question which is raised from the analysis of this data is which group, is whether L1-E or L1-C produced more native-French-like productions of French/y/. This question is explored using Figure 3.3.4

Figure 3.3.4 Production of French /y/ by individual participants. Red markers indicate L1-C productions, while blue markers indicate L1-E productions.

From Figure 3.3.4, we can see the production of all French-/y/ for all participants. It becomes clear from a visual inspection of this figure that the production of French-/y/ by almost all participants in the L1-E group are more native-French-like than those productions by the L1-C group. Overall, there is a much larger concentration of productions in the front of the vowel space for almost all participants in the L1-E group; the exceptions are: EP9, who shows more variable production of /y/ along the F2 dimension, and; CP7 who, like the L1-E participants, shows a higher concentration of French-/y/ productions with higher F2 values.

Interestingly, the observation that the L1-E productions of French-/y/ are more native-like, having higher F2 values, is only observed marginally in Figure 3.0, which showed the mean Bark-Scaled values for each participant group (L1-C or L1-E). This may be attributed to the scaling of the figure and the size of the point on the graph. When looking at Figure 4.0, which shows the mean values for vowel productions in all three languages by each participant, it is observed that the production of /y/ in both Cantonese and French was almost identical, with respect to both F1 and F2 for participants CP5, CP6 and CP7, which may suggest that these participants assimilated the ‘new’ French-/y/ to their category for Cantonese-/y/, which is the only piece of evidence for a positive language transfer from the L1 to the L3.

4. DISCUSSION

The core question in this study was: Do the productions of vowels in French by French-Immersion graduates contain an L1 influence? Between the two groups of participants, the answer is not clear—I am arguing that the L1-C participants do not exhibit an L1 influence, while the L1-E participants do demonstrate an L1 influence. It would appear that the L1-C participants have formed separate categories between the two languages, Cantonese and French, for all three high vowels investigated in this study /i y u/, as they produce similar vowel formant patterns as the L1-E participants, which I posit, do demonstrate an L1-influence in their production of French, since the ANOVA tests showed very little variance for the L1-E’s production of /i u/ between English and French productions.

When speaking both English and French, the L1-C participants produced higher F1 values for all vowels; however, on the F2 dimension, the pattern was relatively equal to those of the L1-E speaking group. Therefore, the hypothesis of an L1 influence for the L1-E participants and an L2 influence for the L1-C participants is confirmed.

When speaking both English and French, the L1-E participants produced higher F1 values for all vowels in the respective languages. Although the pattern found in the French productions, with lower F1 values for L1-E participants and higher F1values for L1-C participants are patterns found in the respective native productions, there are other possibilities which may be responsible for this finding.

One reason may be that the L1-C group, which consisted of persons who were Oriental, were physically smaller in height than the L1-E group, which consisted primarily of persons who were Caucasian. Since F1 is the acoustic correlate of vowel height and the resonant frequencies are higher for those who have smaller vocal tracts than those who have larger vocal tracts, this may explain why the resonant frequencies for vowel production are significantly higher for the L1-C group of participants. I am arguing that the physical size of the participants, rather than an L1-influence, is responsible for the higher F1 values for all vowels produced because of the variance observed for the case of the production of Cantonese-/u/ (m =5.20, SD=1.03), when compared to French/u/ (m=3.77, SD=0.58). If there was an L1-influence for the production of the French vowels /i y u/, one would see that the production of French /u/ by L1-C participants would have significantly higher F1 values than what is presently seen for the L1-C population.

Although the production of /u/ by the L1-C group in French and English is higher when compared to that of the L1-E participants, it is not relatively higher when compared to the other vowels produced by the L1-C participants. The L1-C participants showed more differences between their L1 productions and the other two languages, English and French; hence, the possibility that there is an L1 influence in the French productions does not seem likely for the L1-C group. Given this data, I argue that an L2 influence does seem to be operating in the L3 for the L1-C participants. This result is consistent with that found by Leung (2005), which showed that Cantonese-English bilinguals of L3 French had better grasp of syntactic categories than Vietnamese L2 French learners. Leung (2005) argues that the L3 French group acquired the relevant properties in English (their L2) which, in turn helped them subsequently acquire French (the L3); in contrast, the L2 (French) subjects, on the other hand, did not have this advantage since did not acquire English as an L2 previously. Therefore, with respect to the productions of /i/ and /u/, I posit that an L2 influence, rather than an L1 influence, is operating in the case of the L1-C group.

Furthermore, in the case of the French Immersion language learning setting, one must acknowledge the possibility that both groups of learners, L1-C and L1-E, are exposed to a mixture of French and English during the time of acquisition and throughout the duration of the program. Since the population of French-Immersion students is predominantly English-monolinguals, the L1-C participants are often exposed to both English and French when speaking with their native English peers due to factors such as Language Anxiety [2] or Language Learning Motivation (MacIntyre, 2007. Moreover, the, as stated by Best and Tyler (2007): "When spoken in the classroom, the L2 is often uttered by L1-accented teacher, or, at best, by speakers from diverse L2 varieties, thus presenting a variable (or incorrect) model of L2 phonetic details.

Corroborating evidence for the claim that an L2 influence exists, rather than an L1 influence, is the plotted mean value for French-/y/ by the L1-C group. As we noted in the visual inspection of Figure 3.1, the production of Cantonese- /y/ has a higher F1 relative to its’ unrounded counterpart /i/; however, the production of French-/y/ by the L1-C group, is lower when compared to /i/ in French, which is the same pattern produced in French by the L1-E group.

Previous work by MacLeod, Stoel-Gammon and Wassink (2009) demonstrated that early English-French bilinguals produced French-monolingual-like productions of the high tense-lax pairs of vowels ( /i ɪ /) and (/u ʊ/). If this is the case for the present L1-E group, in which all participants reported being enrolled in an early French Immersion program, then I can predict that the production of /y/ by L1-E participants is also be more like /y/ produced by native-French speakers. Given that the production of /y/ by the L1-E participants is closer to their production of /i/ on the F2 dimension when compared to the productions of /i/ and /y/ by the L1-C participants, I suspect this may be the case.

4.1 The production of French /y/ by L1-E population.

The production of French /y/ by the L1-E group in the present study supports the findings of Flege’s (1987). Seeing that L1-E group did not diverge substantially from the L1-C group speakers in their phonetic space for /y/ on the F2 dimension, suggesting that /y/ was indeed perceived as a "new" sound and not assimilated to /u/. This finding supports the predictions of the present study and that of Flege’s SLM, which claims that experienced learners create the new category for the new sound in the L2. Moreover, the postulate that perceived new sounds are produced with more accuracy was supported, contradicting the findings of Chen, Ng and Li (2012). However, two possible alternative explanations for the L1-E group’s relatively accurate production of /y/ exist.

Firstly, it is possible that that they were not producing a novel sound: they may have simply been drawing upon vowel tokens that were already in their repertoire: particularly fronted versions of English /u/, a possibility also explored by Chang, Yao, Haines and Rhodes (2011). Some researchers (Strange et al., 2007; Levy, 2009; Levy and Law II, 2010) have proposed that due to the fact that (American) English /u/, which is already relatively front on average, is further fronted in the context of alveolars, the front vowel /y/ may not actually constitute a "new" vowel for English-speaking L2 learners, but instead a "similar" vowel, at least in the context of alveolars. Considering that many of the target words in the present study began with alveolar consonants, this may be a plausible explanation for the relatively accurate production of /y/ by the L1-E group.

Otherwise, the finding that /y/ was produced accurately by the L1-E group can be accounted for by the fact that all participants in this group had linguistic training; all participants were undergraduate students in the Department of Linguistics or graduate students in The School of Audiology and Speech Sciences at UBC. Therefore, it is possible that the participants were aware phonetically aware of the /u/-/y/ contrast and were able to produce /y/ correctly because of the training they had received in phonological and phonetic course-work achieved at the undergraduate or graduate level. Interestingly, if this is the case, it would also support an important implication of the PAM-L2 view, put forth by Best and Tyler’s (2007), which asserts that "the perceptual objects/events of interest depend on the perceiver’s perceptual goals or focus of attention" (P. 25, Bohn & Munro, 2007).

Nevertheless, given the history of research which supports that native English speakers have difficulty perceiving the /y/-/u/ contrast in French e.g. Gottfried, 1984; Flege, 1987; Levy, 2009), I argue that the creation of the new category for French-/y/ is formed for these participants because of the continuous input they received in French, by various French teachers and their peers, over the 13 years of experience they had in the French-Immersion setting. Furthermore, although the possibility that linguistic training may have influenced their accurate productions of French-/y/, when I analysed the production of CP5, the only Cantonese participant who also had linguistic training in the same sense, this was not found. Moreover, as noted above, there is the exception of CP11, who also showed dispersion along the F2 dimension for their production of French /y/; yet, this participant reported having the same amount of linguistic training as the other participants. Thus, it is apparent that the accurate production of French-/y/ by the L1-E participants is a demonstration of the prediction made by Flege’s (1995) SLM model that experienced learners will produce the new L2 sound with accuracy.

4.2 Individual Differences

The most interesting finding from the individual analysis was that there was evidence of a positive language transfer from L1 to L3 for three participants, CP5, CP6 and CP7 for the production of French-/y/. For the production of all other vowels by the L1-C group /i u/, the results from this study suggest a positive L2 to L3 transfer for all individual participants. This result suggests that heritage students, or other students simultaneously learning English while in French Immersion, may show a positive transfer from the heritage language to French, but only for sounds which are not found in English. Interestingly, as revealed from their participant questionnaires, these three participants, CP5, CP6, CP7, were the only participants who also reported living in a country other than Canada for more than one year before beginning the immersion program; CP5 reported living in Hong Kong for the first 4 years of life, while CP6 reported living there for the first 3 years of life. CP7 reported living in Macau until the age of 6. Therefore, the assimilation of French/y/ to Cantonese-/y/ in these particular participants may have happened because these participants had more input, and thus had a stronger category for Cantonese/y/ than the two other Vancouver-Canadian-born Cantonese speakers, who likely received more early Canadian English input than the three participants who were born outside of Canada.

Other interesting findings between members of the L1-C group include the finding that CP7, the only participant in this group who reported living in a Francophone environment, showed the least variability between their productions of /i y/ in each spoken language; as we can see from Figure 4.0, the production of /i/ is overlapping for all three languages and this is also seen for the production of /y/ in both French and Cantonese. This may suggest that living in a Francophone environment and hearing Francophone rather than accented French in the classroom and interacting with these speakers may play a role in solidifying linguistic categories. Additionally, CP5, who was the only participant in this group who had linguistic training, had the lowest F1 values for vowel productions overall between the L1-C participants. Looking at the vertical axis, I observed that, with the exception of Cantonese/u/, this participants’ productions is within the same range as the L1-C participants, suggesting that linguistic training may be a factor influencing participants’ productions since they may be aware of linguistic expectations for certain sounds.

Conversely, these cases may simple be examples of sounds produced which support Flege’s Equivalence Classification Hypothesis, which posits that, because of an established L1 or language dominance, theL1-C group would produce merged categories for the similar vowels due to the lack of significant differences across the same vowel pair in two languages. This explanation would also account for Flege’s (1995) postulate that familiar sounds are more difficult to produce, further contradicting the findings by Chen, Ng and Li (2012).

Among the L1-E participants, it was observed that EP8 had higher F1 values for all vowel productions, and interestingly, she was the only participant in this group who reported learning a third language, Spanish between the ages of 13 and 17. The possibility that the language experience in Spanish may be interacting with the production of all the vowels in her entire vowel system is unlikely though, especially since she acquired Spanish outside of the critical period (Lenneberg, 1962).

The observations in this section may suggest effects of linguistic experiences on the production of vowels; however, as will be discussed in the following section (4.3 ), the speculations made here may be insignificant, and it may not be appropriate to generalize these findings to larger populations.

4.4. Limitations

It must be acknowledged that our ability to draw conclusions is tempered by five limitations inherent to the study: (1) there were only 10 participants in the entire study; thus, it is possible that the finding between groups may be misleading due to individual differences; (2) all the participants in the study were females; thus, perhaps, the results found here may only be generalizable to female populations; (3) only three high vowels were analyzed, which is less than a fourth of the vowel inventories of Cantonese, English and French; (4) although the phonetic contexts for the target vowels were close in nature, not all phonological environments were taken into consideration; (4) and only the first two formants were measured acoustically.

5. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

This study investigated the production of the high vowels /i y u/ in Cantonese, English and French. The primary research question of this study examined whether or not there was an L1 influence in the production of French vowels /i y u/ by each respective group of participants, L1-C and L1-E. Acoustic analyses revealed that the French production of /i u/ by L1-E participants was different than their productions of the same vowels in English. Interestingly, the productions of these same French vowels by the L-C participants demonstrated a very similar pattern on the F2 dimension, such that I argue a positive language transfer for both groups from English to French. The production of French-/y/ by the L1-E participants demonstrated favourable evidence to support the claims of Flege’s (1995) SLM model: these experienced L2 learners successfully created a new category for French /y/; arguably, they even produced French-/y/ in a more French-monolingual-like way, when compared to the productions of French-/y/ by the L1-C participants. Analyses for individual participants revealed that the production of French-/y/ by the L1-C group was produced with more variation on the F2 dimension, producing further evidence supporting Flege’s (1995) SLM postulate that familiar sounds are harder to produce more accurately than new sounds in the L2, or subsequent language learned.

The research conducted in this study is meaningful because it provides further evidence that the predictions made by SLM model hold true even for L3 learners of a language or heritage learners. Moreover, this study provides compelling evidence to support Simon & D’Hustler’s (2012) claim that the predictions of Flege’s (1995) SLM can be extended to L2 learners in an FLA context.

In order to fully understand the perception-production relationship, future research on this topic should address both perception and production of vowels by the same population of participants. Moreover, a larger population of participants, involving both groups of genders, in future studies is needed in order to make claims which can be generalized to larger populations. Even though more females than males are enrolled in French-Immersion programs (PISA, 2000), future research which include both populations could address potential gender differences which exist with respect to vowel perception, production and in the perception-production interface, which are unknown today. Lastly, future research which addresses the entire vowel system, rather than just a portion of the system, would provide a means for more meaningful and conclusive findings with respect to the acoustic-phonetic differences between L2 and L3 French-Immersion students, for the learning in an FLA context, and in the field of second language acquisition as an entirety.