Could You Say [læp˺ tɒp˺]? Acquisition of Unreleased Stops by Advanced French Learners of English Using Spectrograms and Gestures

Abstract

The present study analyses the production rates of stop-unrelease amongst advanced French learners of English before and after training. Although stop-unrelease may be regarded as a minor issue in English pronunciation teaching, it has received some attention in recent years. Earlier studies showed that amongst “phonetically naive English listeners”, the lack of release of /p/, /t/ and /k/ leads to lower identification scores. The present study analyses the speech of 31 French university students majoring in English to measure the efficiency of an awareness approach on the production of stop-unrelease. The experiment comprised three phases with a test and a control group. During Phase 1, both groups were asked to read pairs of words and sentences containing medial and final voiceless stops. We chose combinations of two identical stops (homorganic) or stops with different places of articulation (heterorganic), as well as stops in utterance-final position. Namely, wait for me at that table over there, that pan, or I like that truck. In Phase 2, one group watched an explanatory video to increase awareness on stop-unrelease in English before reading Phase 1 words and sentences a second time. The remaining group was the control group and did not receive any training. Among the participants, 17 read a French text containing pairs of stops in similar positions to those in the English one, which served as an L1 baseline. In total, six students continued until Phase 3 (reading the same stimuli a month later; three in the control group and three in the test group). The results showed that sentence-final stops were overwhelmingly released (above 90%) in both English and French in Phase 1. Training had a significant impact on sentence-final stop-unrelease (p < 0.001), which rose from 9.65% to 72.2%. Progress was also visible in other contexts as in heterorganic pairs of stops. Based on these results, we strongly recommend the combined use of spectrograms and gestures to raise awareness in a classroom or for online learning so as to reach multiple learner profiles and further increase efficiency in pronunciation learning.