Waseda University has a press release, “Phonetic or morpholexical issues? New study reveals L2 French ambiguity,” that begins:
Ambiguous speech production is a common challenge for learners of a second language (L2), but identifying whether the problem lies in pronunciation or deeper linguistic processing is not always straightforward. A new study conducted by Professor Sylvain Detey from Waseda University, with Dr. Verdiana De Fino from IRIT, UT3, University of Toulouse & Archean Labs, France, and Dr. Lionel Fontan, Head of Archean Labs, France, sheds light on this distinction. Their study was published on October 30, 2025, in the journal Language Testing in Asia.
The researchers sought to determine whether ambiguous speech errors made by Japanese learners of French could be better categorized through a combined phonetic and morpholexical assessment approach. By “morpholexical,” they refer to errors related to the way learners select and form words—such as choosing the correct verb ending, preposition, or gender marker—rather than just pronunciation mistakes. They designed an experimental protocol where learners’ utterances were evaluated by native French speakers for perceived ambiguity between word forms.
Using an innovative rating method and perceptual analysis, the team explored how certain cues in speech, such as vowel quality or gender-marking consonants, can lead to multiple interpretations. The results revealed that ambiguity in L2 speech cannot always be explained by phonetic inaccuracy alone; rather, morphological processing plays a significant role, especially when learners attempt to utter complex word forms or inflectional patterns. “Our findings indicate that some speech errors stem not only from misarticulation but also from confusion at the morpholexical level,” says Prof. Detey.
The study provides empirical evidence that calls for a shift in how L2 pronunciation and lexical access are taught. Instead of isolating pronunciation drills from vocabulary and morphology exercises, educators may need to integrate them more holistically. Such integration could help learners overcome the hidden ambiguities that occur when sound and meaning interact.
Interesting stuff; I don’t remember where I came across the link, so if someone out there sent it to me, I thank them. (The paper is open access.)
French prepositions? Just use “de”, it’s more likely to be correct in French than other Romance languages.
I was just having a discussion elsewhere about African tone languages, which often exemplify this issue. It’s pretty typical in African languages for tone not only to distinguish lexical minimal pairs but to be used to make morphological and syntactic distinctions too. Most SAE speakers have great trouble with tone, and frequently make errors in production and/or perception.
For example, in Kusaal these two utterances are distinguished by tone alone:
Ò zàb nâ’ab lā. “He’s fought with the chief.”
he fight chief the
“He’s fought with the chief.”
Ò záb nà’ab lā. “Let him fight the chief.”
What’s happening here is that there is a tone overlay present in the first sentence which marks the VP as non-subordinate; this prevents tone raising after third-person subject pronouns, which is otherwise the default, and also affects the tone sandhi after the verb, causing initial tone raising in nà’ab “chief” despite the fact that zàb “fight” belongs to a tone class which does not have this effect. The second sentence lacks the tone overlay because it is technically a subordinate clause, with an ellipted main clause like m bɔɔd ye “I want that …”; such ellipsis is rare in writing, but very common in informal speech.
So mixing up the two sentences could be due to either failure to hear/make correct tone distinctions, as a phonological matter, or a failure to have learnt the syntactic rule which requires a tone overlay in positive-polarity main clauses, but not subordinate clauses.