Understanding the role of orthography in the acquisition of a non-native vowel contrast

This paper examines the role of orthographic information used during training on the ability to learn a non-native vowel contrast. We investigate whether exposure to novel grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences can help learners in the acquisition of a new phonological contrast. Three related experiments were carried out on the acquisition of the French vowel opposition between /u/ (as in ‘vous’, you) and /y/ (as in ‘vu’, seen) by American English listeners. The experiments consisted of word learning, perceptual discrimination and vowel-categorization tasks. The results reveal that the use of orthography during training did not appear to have a significant influence on performance during testing and that the consonantal context in which the French vowels occur influences the categorization of the vowels by American English listeners. We explore several explanations as to the lack of an effect and, secondarily, discuss implications of these studies for pronunciation training involving the use of minimal pairs.