Allophonic alternations influence non‐native perception of stress.

Abstract

We examined the identification of stressed syllables by adult L2 Spanish learners to see if it is influenced by an allophonic alternation driven by word position and stress. We utilized the Spanish voiced stop‐approximant alternation, where stops occur in word onsets and stressed‐syllable onsets. If L2 learners track the distribution of this alternation, they should link stops to stressed syllables in word onset position and approximants to unstressed, word medial position. Low‐ and Intermediate‐level L1 English/L2 Spanish learners, Native Spanish and monolingual English speakers listened to a series of CVCV nonce words and determined which syllable they perceived as stressed. In Experiment 1, we crossed onset allophone and vowel stress. In Experiment 2, we alternated the onset allophone and held the vowel steady. Our results show that less experienced groups were more likely to perceive stressed vowels and approximant onset syllables as stressed. This suggests that learning the interplay between allophonic distributions and their conditioning factors is possible with experience. L2 learners track distributions in the input and this, in turn, influences their perception of other properties in the language, in this case, syllable stress. Native language distributions and target language proficiency play a role in this process.