L2 Phonological Acquisition Research Articles

Doing away with the ‘native speaker’: a complex adaptive systems approach to L2 phonological attainment

Employing the complex adaptive systems (CAS) model, the present case study provides a self-report description of the attitudes, perceptions and experiences of an advanced adult L2 English learner with respect to his L2 phonological attainment. CAS is predicated on the notion that an individual's cognitive processes are intricately related to his or her experiences in particular social contexts and all language activities are dynamically regulated. In the study, interview data and reflective essay entries were analysed. The findings revealed that motives for L2 speech production and the concomitant attempts to improve L2 phonology were in a phase transition between idiolect (individual) and communal (social) levels. Autonomy, experience and environment were influential in the reorganisation of the learner's attitudes and perceptions about L2 pronunciation and accent. In addition, the learner's awareness of phonological variation, external motives and individual goals interact with one another in a dynamic fashion. The learner appreciates linguistic diversity and rejects the idealised ‘native speaker’ norm in the acquisition of L2 phonology. Finally, based on the findings of the study, implications pertaining to L2 learning, teaching and research are discussed.

L2 ACQUISITION OF PROSODIC PROPERTIES OF SPEECH RHYTHM

This study examines the development of speech rhythm in second language (L2) learners of typologically different first languages (L1s) at different levels of proficiency. An empirical investigation of durational variation in L2 English productions by L1 Mandarin learners and L1 German learners compared to native control values in English and the learners’ L1s showed that the L1 groups followed comparable developmental paths in their acquisition of vocalic variability and accentual lengthening. However, the two L1 groups diverged in the proportion of vocalic materials in their L2 utterances, exhibiting L2 acquisition patterns that are consistent with direct transfer from the L1. The results support a multisystemic model of L2 rhythm acquisition in which the various linguistic-systemic properties that contribute to speech rhythm are acquired at different proficiency levels and depend on different acquisition processes with respect to L1 influence and universal effects. We conclude that theories of L2 phonology need to be able to accommodate the multisystemic nature of L2 prosodic acquisition. Additionally, L2 phonological acquisition theories, and SLA theories more generally, should take into account the nonuniform manner in which the various prosodic properties of the interlanguage reflect L1 transfer effects as well as universal constraints on acquisition.

ARABSKI, JANUSZ, & WOJTASZEK, ADAM. (Eds.). The Acquisition of L2 Phonology. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2011. Pp. vii, 182. $119.95, cloth. ISBN 978–1–84769–375–4.

article reviews the book The Acquisition of L2 Phonology, edited by Janusz Arabski and Adam Wojtaszek.

Perception-based vowel insertion by native Spanish-speaking learners of English

A hypothesis is proposed which claims that vowel prosthesis before word-initial [sC] clusters by L1 Spanish learners of English is a perception-based repair phenomenon conditioned by L1 biases for native patterns of intergestural timing in complex onsets. Data from a series of off-line perception tests involving fifty L1 Spanish-speaking children confirm the erroneous perception of an extra syllable in a majority of nonce tokens containing the target stimuli. Results of a set of follow-up discrimination and identification tasks prove that Spanish-speakers access information derived from native timing patterns in order to map continuous speech streams to categorical units before lexical storage occurs, supporting the viability of a bias derived from native timing configurations. The findings are of interest since they bear directly on contemporary research in the acquisition of L1 phasing relations and their effects on L2 phonological acquisition.

Review of Arabski, Janusz and Adam Wojtaszek (eds.): The acquisition of L2 phonology

Review of Arabski, Janusz and Adam Wojtaszek (eds.): The acquisition of L2 phonology

When Is a Difference Really Different? Learners’ Discrimination of Linguistic Contrasts in American Sign Language

Learners' ability to recognize linguistic contrasts in American Sign Language (ASL) was investigated using a paired‐comparison discrimination task. Minimal pairs containing contrasts in five linguistic categories (i.e., the formational parameters of movement, handshape, orientation, and location in ASL phonology, and a category comprised of contrasts in complex morphology) were presented in sentence contexts to a sample of 127 hearing learners at beginning and intermediate levels of proficiency and 10 Deaf native signers. Participants’ responses were analyzed to determine the relative difficulty of the linguistic categories and the effect of proficiency level on performance. The results indicated that movement contrasts were the most difficult and location contrasts the easiest, with the other categories of stimuli of intermediate difficulty. These findings have implications for language learning in situations in which the first language is a spoken language and the second language (L2) is a signed language. In such situations, the construct of language transfer does not apply to the acquisition of L2 phonology because of fundamental differences between the phonological systems of signed and spoken languages, which are associated with differences between the modalities of speech and sign.

VOCABULARY SIZE IS ASSOCIATED WITH SECOND-LANGUAGE VOWEL PERCEPTION PERFORMANCE IN ADULT LEARNERS

Improvement in second-language (L2) perception has been posited to occur early in L2 learning when the L2 vocabulary is still small, whereas a large L2 vocabulary curtails perceptual learning (the perceptual assimilation model for SLA [PAM-L2]; Best & Tyler, 2007). This proposition is extended by suggesting that early L2 lexical development facilitates the establishment of phonological categories in a manner analogous to children’s first-language (L1) acquisition before as opposed to after the vocabulary spurt. According to this view, L2 speech should be assimilated more consistently to L1 phonological categories and cross-boundary contrasts should be discriminated more accurately by learners with larger L2 vocabularies. To test this proposition, a novel whole-system approach to evaluate perception of L2 vowels in two experiments was applied. In Experiment 1, Japanese learners of Australian English (AusE) with less than 12 weeks of L2 learning in Australia completed labeling and goodness ratings on all AusE vowels, selecting from among all monomoraic and bimoraic Japanese vowels and vowel combinations. They also discriminated four L2 vowel contrasts, representing a range of PAM-L2 contrast types, and completed a L2 vocabulary size assessment. Learners with larger vocabularies had more consistent L2-L1 vowel assimilation and more accurate cross-boundary discrimination than those with smaller vocabularies, supporting the proposition that lexical development assists L2 phonological acquisition. Experiment 2 compared the perception of AusE vowels by Japanese learners after only 4–8 weeks in Australia with their perception after 6–8 months of L2 exposure. The results also supported the predicted positive association between L2 vocabulary size and L2 vowel perception rather than a general prediction of increased exposure duration leading to improved perception.

Symposium – Accentuating the Positive: Directions in Pronunciation Research

Held at the Association canadienne de linguistique appliquée/Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics Conference, Ottawa, Canada; 27 May 2009.Over the past few decades perspectives on second language (L2) pronunciation have evolved from pessimistic appraisals of the capabilities of L2 learners and doubts about the value of instruction to a view of pronunciation teaching as an effective and important part of language pedagogy. Earlier research on the teaching of pronunciation dwelt extensively on the identification of learners' errors (mainly consonants and vowels) through comparative analyses. Until recently, little had been established about the effectiveness of pronunciation teaching, and pedagogical techniques were based more on speculation and theoretical notions than on empirically well-justified principles. More recent work addresses a broader range of issues relating not only to L2 phonological acquisition, but to the social implications of speaking with an accent and engaging with interlocutors, both native and non-native speakers of the L2. Among these are the relationship between accent and intelligibility, cognitive processes underlying phonological learning, the evaluation of L2 speech using impressionistic and acoustic techniques, prosodic influences on perception of accented speech, the role of ethnic affiliation and identity in L2 speakers' oral production, and the identification of misguided applications of knowledge about pronunciation by businesses and governments. These lines of work, along with empirical investigations of pronunciation instruction, engender a more sophisticated view of L2 phonological learning and teaching. Though further research remains to be done, important achievements have been made in identifying reasonable, achievable goals in the pronunciation classroom, establishing appropriate instructional foci, and evaluating outcomes. The presenters in this colloquium highlighted the major achievements of recent years and identified some of the important problems that remain.

Increased second‐language vocabulary size is associated with more consistent second‐language vowel categorization and better discrimination.

Improvement in second‐language (L2) perception has been posited to asymptote early in L2 learning when the L2 vocabulary is still small, whereas a large L2 vocabulary curtails perceptual learning [PAM‐L2: Best and Tyler (2007)]. We extend this proposition by suggesting that early L2 lexical development facilitates establishment of phonological categories in a manner analogous to toddlers’ L1 acquisition before versus after the vocabulary explosion. According to this revised view, L2 speech should be assimilated more consistently to phonological categories, and cross‐boundary contrasts discriminated more accurately, by learners with large versus small L2 vocabularies. We applied a novel whole‐system approach to evaluate perception of L2 vowels with respect to the L1 vowel system. Japanese learners of Australian English with under 12 weeks of L2 immersion completed labeling and goodness ratings on all Australian vowels, using all mono‐ and bi‐moraic Japanese vowels and vowel combinations. They also completed discrimination tasks on four L2 vowel contrasts, representing a range of PAM‐L2 contrast types, and a L2 vocabulary size assessment. Learners with larger vocabularies had more consistent vowel assimilation and more accurate cross‐boundary discrimination than those with smaller vocabularies, supporting the proposition that lexical development supports L2 phonological acquisition. [Work supported by NIH and MARCS/UWS.]

Integrating articulatory constraints into models of second language phonological acquisition

ABSTRACTModels such as Eckman's markedness differential hypothesis, Flege's speech learning model, and Brown's feature-based theory of perception seek to explain and predict the relative difficulty second language (L2) learners face when acquiring new or similar sounds. In this paper, we test their predictive adequacy as concerns native English speakers’ mastery of French /ʁ/ and Spanish /ɾ/. Based on an acoustic analysis of the learner data, we demonstrate that these three models do not account for the full range of variability nor for the developmental sequences attested, because they do not consider the degree of difficulty involved in the simultaneous mastery of multiple phonetic parameters across prosodic positions. Consequently, models of L2 phonological acquisition must not only integrate findings from markedness theory and speech perception but also incorporate phonetic constraints on production.

The Role of Structural Position in L2 Phonological Acquisition: Evidence from English Learners of Spanish as L2

Abstract: In this pilot study, the speech of 12 adult native speakers of English with intermediate to intermediate‐high proficiency in Spanish as a second language (L2) was analyzed to determine whether L2 learners rely on distributional information in the process of L2 speech learning and if so, if similar or dissimilar distributional patterns of sounds are more easily acquired. The parameter for (dis)similarity was set around the notion of structural position in combination with native language (L1) and L2 phonemic inventories. The results show that the subjects were consistently more successful in producing the phonemes with overlapping distributional patterns in L1 and L2 than phonemes whose distribution differed in L1 and L2 as well as novel L2 contrasts.

Learning new segments and reducing domains in German L2 phonology: The role of the Prosodic Hierarchy

This paper investigates interactions between the prosodic structures of L1 and L2 in second language acquisition. We focus here on a case in which the L1 and L2 are quite different with regard to the role played by the prosodic structures: the acquisition of German by speakers of Spanish. “Demarcating languages” such as German tend to phonologically mark the beginnings and/ or ends of relatively small prosodic constituents, while “Grouping languages” such as Spanish tend to favor the application of phonological phenomena throughout relatively long constituents. The subset-superset relationship inherent in current views of L2 acquisition, in particular the Asymmetry Hypothesis, predicts that reducing the domain of application of a process should be impossible to learn. In this light, we examine data (spontaneous and read speech of 11 Spanish speakers learning German) involving phonological processes which differ both in their segmental content and in their domains of application in the two languages. Our results are different from those predicted, that is, the pattern of acquisition cuts across the categories that would be established in such framework. Our findings thus demonstrate that the Asymmetry Hypothesis cannot be maintained as a model of L2 phonological acquisition, at least in its present form.

Speech technologies for pronunciation feedback and evaluation

Educators and researchers in the acquisition of L2 phonology have called for empirical assessment of the progress students make after using new methods for learning (Chun, 1998, Morley, 1991). The present study investigated whether unlimited access to a speech-recognition-based language-learning program would improve the general standard of pronunciation of a group of middle-aged immigrant professionals studying English in Sweden. Eleven students were given a copy of the program Talk to Me from Auralog as a supplement to a 200-hour course in Technical English, and were encouraged to practise on their home computers. Their development in spoken English was compared with a control group of fifteen students who did not use the program. The program is evaluated in this paper according to Chapelle’s (2001) six criteria for CALL assessment. Since objective human ratings of pronunciation are costly and can be unreliable, our students were pre- and post-tested with the automatic PhonePass SET-10 test from Ordinate Corp. Results indicate that practice with the program was beneficial to those students who began the course with a strong foreign accent but was of limited value for students who began the course with better pronunciation. The paper begins with an overview of the state of the art of using speech recognition in L2 applications.

THE ONTOGENY MODEL: EVIDENCE FROM L2 ACQUISITION OF SPANISH r

This study tests a model for L2 phonological acquisition, using longitudinal data from beginning learners of Spanish. The model claims that transfer processes decrease over time, while developmental processes increase and then decrease. The data for L2 acquisition of Spanish r largely support the claims. The analysis also reveals a hierarchical organization of processes in L2 acquisition and an interaction of the L1 and L2 systems. The study further demonstrates that the same processes underlie L1 and L2 acquisition and synchronic and diachronic phenomena.

THE BEGINNINGS OF NON-SCHOOL ROOM L2 PHONOLOGICAL ACQUISITION

Article THE BEGINNINGS OF NON-SCHOOL ROOM L2 PHONOLOGICAL ACQUISITION was published on January 1, 1978 in the journal International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (volume 16, issue 1-4).