Abstract
Japanese learners of English can acquire /r/ and /l/, but discrimination accuracy rarely reaches native speaker levels. How do L2 learners develop phonological categories to acquire a vocabulary when they cannot reliably tell them apart? This study aimed to test the possibility that learners establish new L2 categories but perceive phonological overlap between them when they perceive an L2 phone. That is, they perceive it to be an instance of more than one of their L2 phonological categories. If so, improvements in discrimination accuracy with L2 experience should correspond to a reduction in overlap. Japanese native speakers differing in English L2 immersion, and native English speakers, completed a forced category goodness rating task, where they rated the goodness of fit of an auditory stimulus to an English phonological category label. The auditory stimuli were 10 steps of a synthetic /r/–/l/ continuum, plus /w/ and /j/, and the category labels were L, R, W, and Y. Less experienced Japanese participants rated steps at the /l/-end of the continuum as equally good versions of /l/ and /r/, but steps at the /r/-end were rated as better versions of /r/ than /l/. For those with more than 2 years of immersion, there was a separation of goodness ratings at both ends of the continuum, but the separation was smaller than it was for the native English speakers. Thus, L2 listeners appear to perceive a phonological overlap between /r/ and /l/. Their performance on the task also accounted for their responses on /r/–/l/ identification and AXB discrimination tasks. As perceived phonological overlap appears to improve with immersion experience, assessing category overlap may be useful for tracking L2 phonological development.
Highlights
Adult second language (L2) learners almost invariably speak with a recognizable foreign accent (Flege et al 1995; Flege et al 1999)
The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how perceived phonological overlap might account for speech perception in learners who have acquired new L2 phonological categories, which is the focus of Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM)’s extension to L2 speech learning, PAM-L2
It was hypothesized that Japanese native speakers who had first been exposed to English in Japan would perceive a phonological overlap between /r/ and /l/, but that the overlap would be smaller for those with a long period of immersion in an English-speaking environment (>2 years) than those with a short period of immersion (
Summary
Adult second language (L2) learners almost invariably speak with a recognizable foreign accent (Flege et al 1995; Flege et al 1999). Less obvious for the casual observer is that they are likely to have difficulty discriminating certain pairs of phonologically contrasting phones in the target language—that is, they hear with an accent (Jenkins et al 1995). Research into cross-language speech perception by naïve listeners has shown that attunement to the native language affects the discrimination of pairs of phonologically contrasting non-native phones (e.g., Best et al 2001; Polka 1995; Tyler et al 2014b; Werker and Logan 1985), often resulting in poor discrimination when both non-native phones are perceived as the same native phonological category. Discrimination of initially difficult contrasts, such as English /r/–/l/ for Japanese native listeners, can improve with naturalistic exposure (MacKain et al 1981) and laboratory training (Bradlow et al 1999; Bradlow et al 1997; Lively et al 1993; Lively et al 1992; Lively et al 1994; Logan et al 1991; Shinohara and Iverson 2018). In spite of the improvements from high variability training, the learners’ performance did not reach the same level of accuracy as that of native speakers of English
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