Sur la réalisation des voyelles nasales du français par des italophones: une enquete exploratoire

It is well known that the French nasal vowel system represents a great difficulty for foreign students. The aim of this contribution is to describe the production of nasal vowels acquisition by italian speakers in order to investigate their interlanguage grammar and to evaluate the role of spelling in the acquisition of French phonetics and phonology. Although our research is still in its preliminary stages, it seems that for Italian students : (1) the pattern of nasal contrast acquisition is /ã/ >> /ɔ̃/ >> /ɛ̃/, as expected from a typological point of view (low nasal vowels are more frequent than mid and high vowels) ; (2) the phonology/spelling relation is dynamic; as regards /ɛ̃/, for example, productions related to the grapheme < UN > are less accurate than productions of the grapheme < IN > although they refer to the same phoneme.