While much research has been dedicated to studying the speech of French
immersion students, relatively little is known about their sociolinguistic
competence, particularly in the area of phonetics. This study aims to determine
the extent to which a group of French immersion students in Ontario, Canada
display the native Canadian French phenomenon of lowering the high vowel /i/
to its lax allophone // in the obligatory context of a stressed syllable closed by
any consonant other than /v, z, / or //. Results indicate that the majority of the
students do not employ the lax vowel, and those students who demonstrate some
degree of vowel lowering apply the rule inconsistently. No strong correlation
between social or linguistic factors is apparent in the application of the rule,
suggesting that more explicit teaching of this phenomenon is necessary in order
to make students aware of these kinds of native Canadian French speaker
variations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:AEU.10048/840 |
| Date | 06 1900 |
| Creators | Vickerman, Alison |
| Contributors | Nadasdi, Terry (Linguistics), Tucker, Benjamin (Linguistics), Maheux-Pelletier, Genevieve (Modern Languages and Cultural Studies) |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 509266 bytes, application/pdf |
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