The Mixed Effects of Phonetic Input Variability on Relative Ease of L2 Learning: Evidence from English Learners’ Production of French and Spanish Stop-Rhotic Clusters
| Autor: | Jeffrey Steele, Laura Colantoni |
|---|---|
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2018 |
| Předmět: |
lcsh:Language and Literature
Linguistics and Language First language media_common.quotation_subject input Lexicon Language and Linguistics Reading (process) Perception rhotics voicing second language production relative difficulty media_common 060201 languages & linguistics variability consonant clusters stops phonetic parameters manner Phonetics 06 humanities and the arts Second-language acquisition Linguistics 0602 languages and literature Voice lcsh:P Psychology Consonant cluster |
| Zdroj: | Languages, Vol 3, Iss 2, p 12 (2018) Languages; Volume 3; Issue 2; Pages: 12 |
| Popis: | We examined the consequences of within-category phonetic variability in the input on non-native learners’ production accuracy. Following previous empirical research on the L2 acquisition of phonetics and the lexicon, we tested the hypothesis that phonetic variability facilitates learning by analyzing English-speaking learners’ production of French and Spanish word-medial stop-rhotic clusters, which differ from their English counterparts in terms of stop and rhotic voicing and manner. Crucially, for both the stops and rhotics, there are differences in within-language variability. Twenty native speakers per language and 39 L1 English-learners of French (N = 20) and Spanish (N = 19) of intermediate and advanced proficiency performed a carrier-sentence reading task. A given parameter was deemed to have been acquired when the learners’ production fell within the range of attested native speaker values. An acoustic analysis of the data partially supports the facilitative effect of phonetic variability. To account for the unsupported hypotheses, we discuss a number of issues, including the difficulty of measuring variability, the need to determine the extent to which learners’ perception shapes intake, and the challenge of teasing apart the effects of input variability from those of transferred L1 articulatory patterns. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
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