Native French speakers' perception of the Japanese /h/: Ha piece hof cake?

It is commonly observed that native French speakers tend to drop nonnative /h/-like phonemes, or to insert them where unexpected, in the “/h/ languages” they learn (e.g. English). The perception of the Japanese /h/ by French listeners was tested by way of an AXB discrimination task on non-words and a word identification task on Japanese minimal pairs. For naïve listeners not learning Japanese (N=9), the error rate in the discrimination task ranged from 0% to 12.5%; for elementary level learners of Japanese (N=8) the error rate in the identification task ranged from 0% to 8%. 12 errors out of 17 in the latter task occurred when a less familiar word was identified as a more familiar one. These findings suggest that the French perception of the Japanese /h/ is not as difficult as other reported major difficulties in L2 acquisition, and that it interacts with lexical acquisition.