Abstraction of phonological representations in adult nonnative speakers

Alia Lancaster,Kira Gor

doi:10.3765/plsa.v1i0.3725

Alia Lancaster, Kira Gor

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v1i0.3725

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Abstract

Perception of nonnative contrasts by adult second language (L2) learners is affected by native language phonology. The current study contrasted predictions from two models of L2 phonological acquisition that focus on different representational levels as the origin of native language transfer: the abstract categorization level from the Perceptual Assimilation Model for L2 learners (PAM-L2; Best & Tyler, 2007) and the phonetic level from the Automatic Selective Perception model (ASP; Strange, 2011). The target phonemes were pairs of Arabic consonants that were equally similar on the abstract categorization level but unequally similar on the phonetic level—voiced and voiceless pharyngeal fricatives /ʕ/, /ħ/ and uvular fricatives /χ/, /ʁ/. Twenty intermediate-level English-speaking Arabic L2 learners and 10 Arabic native speakers (NS) completed auditory identification and discrimination tasks. We first conducted a discriminant analysis (DA) to quantify ASP predictions based on phonetic variables. L2 learners were generally more accurate when perceiving the pharyngeal consonants compared to the uvulars and when perceiving the voiced phonemes compared to the voiceless. These findings, and L2 learners’ perceptual variation across contexts, predicted by the DA, suggest that L2 speakers were able to track phonetic cues during L2 perception and thus favor the ASP. These results support the interpretation that L2 learners attend to the phonetic detail in nonnative segments; however, they do not build nativelike phonological representations for the segments with weaker phonetic cues. This ability to process low-level phonetic cues opens the possibility for learners to create more robust phonological representations.

Highlights

Phonological representations of L2 speech segments are different from the first language (L1) in several ways
The Perceptual Assimilation Model for L2 learners (PAM-L2) states that L2 learners attend to the phonological level, positing that the L2 learners in the current study would have relatively equal perception among the target phonemes
The Automatic Selective Perception model (ASP) states that learners attend to the phonetic level, which includes more detail such as the variation in phonetic cues induced by different contexts

Summary

Introduction

Phonological representations of L2 speech segments are different from the first language (L1) in several ways. In adult L2 learners, the target population in the current study, L1 may interfere at the phonetic as well as at the phonological level. It is not surprising that there are multiple theories and models of L2 phonological acquisition which differ in the relative importance of the levels of representation. The phonetic level of representation encodes information to categorize phonemes. Nonnative processing at the level of phonetic cue identification has implications for representations and processing at the level of phonological categorization. A breakdown at this level translates to an inability to interpret, categorize, or reproduce a sound segment, such as the inability to discriminate two different speech segments in isolation (e.g., Lukyanchenko & Gor, 2011). Allophones are not as abstract as phonemes, but are more abstract than information represented at the phonetic level. Allophones are represented at a post-phonetic or pre-phonological level

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