Perception of Illusory Vowels by Persian Speakers in a Number of Consonant Clusters of French Loanwords

Document Type : Research

Authors

1 Ph.D. students in Linguistics, department of Linguistics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

2 Linguistics Department, Faculty of Humanities, Tarbiat Modares University, Iran.

3 linguistics department, faculty of literature, Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Persian and French differ in syllable structures; one such difference is consonant clusters. The syllabic structure of Persian at the phonetic level is CV(C)(C). This indicates that consonant clusters are not allowed at the beginning of a syllable in Persian, and only up to two consonants are allowed in the final syllable. Therefore, when French loanwords enter Persian, phonemic and phonetic changes occur to align these words with Persian phonological rules. In this study, we examined the perceptual adaptation process of French loanwords in Persian. To address the research questions, we designed two experiments(31 participants in the first and 30 participants in the second experiment) who had no familiarity with French and their second and third foreign language proficiency levels were below intermediate or elementary. The tasks aimed to determine at which position (initial, medial, or final consonant clusters) native monolingual Persian speakers most frequently perceive an epenthetic vowel. The results indicated that Persian speakers perceived the epenthetic vowel in initial and medial consonant clusters. In the next phase, we examined in which consonant clusters monolingual Persian speakers most frequently perceive an illusory vowel. The results showed that they most frequently perceive the epenthetic vowel in the initial consonant cluster [gl-].

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