Perceptual assimilation of English dental fricatives by native speakers of European French

![CDATA[The phonetic characteristics of French-accented speech suggest that French native speakers often have difficulty producing dental fricatives in English. However, there is a surprising lack of empirical research on perception of those consonants. Canadian French speakers appear to assimilate /θ/ to /t/ and /d/ to /d/, but loanword evidence suggests that European French speakers should assimilate them to /s/ and /z/, respectively. To test this, 151 native European French listeners categorised and rated the goodness-of-fit of English /θ, f, s, t, d, v, z, d/ to French phonological categories. /θ/ was categorised as /f/, whereas /d/ was uncategorised, with responses divided between /v/ and /z/. The remaining consonants were categorised as their corresponding French categories, with /θ/ rated as a poorer French /f/ than /f/. While the majority of individual participants categorised the dental fricatives as /f, v/, there were small subsets of participants who categorised them as /s, z/.]]