This study analyses the relationship between native English speakers’ perception and production of the novel French /y/–/u/ contrast. Acoustic data were extracted from the learners’ production of French minimal pairs contrasting these French vowels and compared with their processing of the same items in a Visual World eye-tracking task. Results reveal that the vowel most acoustically similar to the learners’ native English /u/ vowel, French /y/, is both easier to identify at early processing stages and more acoustically similar to a native French control group in production, indicating a perception-production relationship. Furthermore, analyses of individual variation reveal that the learners who process both /y/ and /u/ more successfully at later processing stages are also more likely to mark a greater distinction between these phonemes in production. Together, these results indicate a relationship between L2 processing and L2 production at multiple levels. Implications for current L2 speech models are discussed.

本研究分析了以英语为母语的人对小说法语/y/–/u/对比的感知与产生之间的关系。声学数据是从学习者产生的法语最小对中提取的，对比这些法语元音，并与他们在视觉世界眼动追踪任务中对相同项目的处理进行比较。结果表明，与学习者的母语英语 /u/ 元音、法语 /y/ 在声学上最相似的元音在早期加工阶段更容易识别，并且在生产中与法语母语对照组在声学上更相似，表明感知-生产关系。此外，对个体差异的分析表明，在后期处理阶段更成功地处理 /y/ 和 /u/ 的学习者也更有可能在生产中标记这些音素之间的更大区别。总之，这些结果表明 L2 处理和 L2 生产在多个层面上的关系。讨论了当前 L2 语音模型的含义。