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Approaches and Methods in French Second Language Acquisition Research
Edited by Martin Howard
[Research Methods in Applied Linguistics 9] 2025
► pp. 45–70

Chapter 3
Methodological consideration in research on French second-language speech perception and spoken word recognition

 | The University of Texas at El Paso
The present chapter provides an overview of methodological considerations for research on French speech perception and spoken word recognition by second/foreign language (L2) learners. French has several phonetic and phonological characteristics that are relatively infrequent cross-linguistically and thus make it a very interesting L2 to investigate from the perspective of speech perception and spoken word recognition. The chapter provides a review of the methodological approaches used in studies that focus on these characteristics, considering both the perception and processing of speech sounds that are lexically contrastive and the perception and processing of speech sounds that signal word boundaries. The chapter also identifies areas for further investigation and open research questions, and it makes theoretical and methodological recommendations that take advantage of the unique properties of French speech for further advancing research on L2 learners’ speech perception and spoken word recognition.
Keywords: speech perception, spoken word recognition, research methods, French, second/foreign language
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Methodological approaches
    • Tasks targeting the perception of lexically contrastive French sounds
    • Tasks targeting the segmentation of French speech
    • L2 learner characteristics: French proficiency and L1
    • French characteristics: Dialectal considerations
  • Evaluation of tasks
  • Future research
  • Conclusion
  • Author queries
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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