On the representation of /h/ by Quebec francophone learners of English
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The current study investigates whether some of the variation in h-production observed among Quebec francophone (QF) learners of English could follow from their at times assimilating /h/ to /ʁ/. In earlier research, we attributed variation exclusively to QFs developing an approximate (“fuzzy” or “murky”) representation of /h/ that is not fully reliable as a base for h-perception and production. Nonetheless, two previous studies observed via event-related potentials differences in QF perceptual ability, which may follow from the quality of the vowel used in the stimuli: /ɑ/ vs. /ʌ/ (detection vs. no detection of /h/). Before the vowel /ɑ/, /h/ exhibits phonetic properties that may allow it to be assimilated to and thus underlyingly represented as /ʁ/. If /h/ is at times subject to approximate representation (e.g., before /ʌ/) and at others captured as /ʁ/ (before /ɑ/), we would expect production of /h/ to reflect this representational distinction, with greater accuracy rates in items containing /ɑ/. Two-way ANOVAs and paired Bayesian t- tests on the reading-aloud data of 27 QFs, however, reveal no difference in h-production according to vowel type. We address the consequences of our findings, discussing notably why QFs have such enduring difficulty acquiring /h/ despite the feature [spread glottis] being available in their representational repertoire. We propose the presence of a Laryngeal Input Constraint that renders representations containing only a laryngeal feature highly marked. We also consider the possibility that, rather than having overcome this constraint, some highly advanced learners are “phonological zombies”: these learners become so adept at employing approximate representations in perception and production that they are indistinguishable from speakers with bona fide phonemic representations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".