Learning to read liaison in French as a Foreign Language: A longitudinal study of beginner Japanese learners in Japan

Many of the studies devoted to the acquisition of liaison in French as a foreign language have been carried out with advanced learners, whose first languages were often typologically close to French, and typically without much consideration to the graphophonemic dimension, which is an essential part of the learning process. In this article, we provide a brief overview of the linguistic and contextual factors in the acquisition of liaison by Japanese learners of French in Japan, with a particular focus on the connection between literacy and phonological skills. We then present initial results of a two-year longitudinal study (four sessions) of text-reading tasks with beginner Japanese learners of French (n = 12) in Tokyo, using the same tasks employed in two large corpora of French native (PFC) and non-native (IPFC) speakers/readers. Our data offer a glimpse into the evolution of these learners during the initial acquisition of L2 phonological/literacy skills.