Lowering of high vowels by French immersion students in Canada

Abstract

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 /ɪ/ in the obligatory context of a stressed syllable closed by any consonant other than /v, z, ʒ/ or /ʀ/. 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.