Articulatory habit versus adaptive flexibility in L2 phone learning

Abstract

Learning a motor task is thought to be facilitated when it can be achieved within a set of thoroughly-learned motor patterns, here termed articulatory habit. Learners of novel phonological categories in an L2 may first attempt to produce a novel sound by working over the possibility space of acoustic outputs defined by well-known articulatory dimensions. A side effect of this neuromuscular habituation to L1 may be a limit to the adaptive flexibility of articulatory resources to the L2. To evaluate the role of L1 habit in individuals’ L2 category productions, 18 L1 English learners of French repeated French stimuli from a model talker while ultrasound and video of lip movement were recorded. Stimuli include the front rounded vowels /y o/, which are outside of the subjects’ articulatory habit in inter-articulator coordination and the particulars of tongue position. A second phase of the study captured L1 English articulatory habit by eliciting a range of English words and recording articulator activity in t...