An Experimental Study on Chinese Students' Language Transfer in Pronunciation ofFrench Vowels

Following the idea of vowel pattern,we designed an experiment on the pronunciation of French vowels articulated by Chinese students whose first foreign language is English and second foreign language is French.The aim of the study is to investigate the transfer of mother tongue and the first foreign language during the process of learning a second foreign language.The result indicates that although both of them can influence the pronunciation of vowels of the second foreign language,the mother tongue exhibits more effect than the first foreign language.This difference lies in the nature of these language systems.Moreover,the result reveals that,similar as the effect of mother tongue,single phoneme of the first foreign language can also influence or phonemes of the second foreign language,that is,the to one and to two modes in the transfer of the first foreign language.