Exposure to speech via foreign film and its effects on non-native vowel production and perception

This research presents two experiments that examine the effect of exposure to second language speech via foreign film on non-native speech production and perception. Experiment 1a investigated whether exposure to French film aided in the ability of naïve monolingual American English speakers to shadow French words containing high rounded vowels /y/ and /u/ as tested via acoustic analyses and native French listener perceptual judgements. Experiment 1b was a crosslinguistic perceptual assimilation task completed by the same participants, designed to explore the perception of rounded vowels /y/ and /u/, before and after film exposure. The results of Experiment 1a indicated that a single session of exposure to French film had a small, but significant, effect on shadowing of French /y/, which was also perceptible to native French listeners. Shadowing of /u/, however, was not significantly affected by exposure. Experiment 1b showed that participants did not alter the patterns of perceptual assimilation between the two French vowels and native English vowels following film exposure. We conclude that exposure to non-native speech via foreign film can affect some aspects of non-native speech development and hypothesize that further sessions may compound these initial benefits, especially in those who are already learning a second language.