The Use of Acoustic Phonetics in Identifying Phonetic Errors: French Nasal Vowels

Authors
M. otroshi
M. otroshi
Department of French, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran
Abstract
Teaching/learning French nasal vowels are one of the problems encountered by Iranian teachers and students in institutes and universities. The problems arise due to the fact that there are no approximate phonetic analogues for those vowels in Persian. In the present study, the acoustic phonetics is used. It is a method based on acoustic analysis using speech analysis and phonetics software. In recent years, voice analysis software’s have made it possible to identify phonetic errors with precision. The research objective is to identify French nasal vowels errors by Iranian students and analyze inter-phoneme-phonetic data. The population under study consists 8 students of the French language at University of Isfahan during the first semester 2015-16. Student’s oral productions have been analyzed by using analysis software with regard to structural physical parameters of F1, F2 and F3. As the results of the present study demonstrate, students in the production of French nasal vowels (CVn) are in trouble due to the absence of such vowels in the native language. The process of “unpacking nasal vowels” and “nasalizing the oral vowels” are evident due to the impact of native language. Therefore, the frequency of phonetic errors, French nasal vowels, has a meaningful relationship with the French nasal vowels characteristics and phonetic structure of the students’ native language.

Keywords

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Language Related Research
Volume 8, Issue 3
July and August 2017
Pages 187-216