A Cross-Linguistic Study of L3 Phonological Acquisition of Stop Contrasts

Abstract

The research reported in this article investigated how students learning Japanese or Russian as a third language (L3) perceived and produced word-initial stops in their respective target language and the link between perception and production. The participants in the study were 39 Chinese university students who spoke Mandarin Chinese as their first language (L1), English as their second language (L2), and Japanese or Russian as their L3. An L3 identification task, an L3 reading task, and an L2 reading task were used to investigate the learners’ perception and production of word-initial stops. The results demonstrated that the phonetic similarity in different stop categories between L1, L2, and L3 contributed to learners’ confusion in perception. On the contrary, L3 learners could perceive the new acoustic feature voicing lead, but found it difficult to produce L3 voiced stops. In addition, the study found a positive relationship between the perception and production of voiceless stops in the initial stage of L3 acquisition, but there was no correlation between the perception and production of voiced stops. Pedagogical implications for L3 speech learning are discussed on the basis of the results.

Third language phonological acquisition: Understanding sound structure in a multilingual world

“…However, they still provide potential factors contributing to cross‐linguistic transfer in phonology, such as typological proximity and language status. In addition, some L2 phonological acquisition models, such as SLM (SLM‐r), PAM (PAM‐L2), and L2LP can be extended to the context of L3 phonological acquisition as demonstrated in several previous studies (Liu & Lin, 2021; Liu et al., 2019; Wrembel et al., 2019).…”

“…This table indicates that most of the research has focused on Indo‐European languages as the target language (i.e. L3), especially Germanic and Romance languages such as German, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, whereas Slavic languages were less studied for example, Russian and Polish (Cabrelli Amaro & Wrembel, 2016; Liu & Lin, 2021). Non‐Indo‐European languages as the target language in L3 phonological research were much less frequent, such as Arabic (Benrabah, 1991, reanalysed in Archibald, 2022), Mandarin Chinese (Gabriel et al., 2016), and Japanese (Tremblay, 2007).…”

“…In terms of the AOA, few previous studies include participants who acquired their L3 before 18 (though see Wrembel et al., 2019). Instead, participants in most studies acquired their L3 as adults (Garcia, 2013; Liu & Lin, 2021; Llama et al., 2010).…”

“…While these studies indicate a range of learning times, the intensity of instruction also varies across studies. For example, Liu and Lin (2021) report participants had 80 h of instruction in 2 months, whereas Onishi's (2016) participants likely received around 45 h of teaching over two semesters 2…”

“…Additionally, L3 linguistic and psycholinguistic studies have, so far, largely focused on larger Indo‐European languages (Liu & Lin, 2021; Rocha‐Hidalgo & Barr, 2022). To give some specific examples of under‐researched multilingual contexts, the majority of Nigeria's estimated 201 million inhabitants are multilingual, using for example, Niger‐Congo languages, English/Hausa and Nigerian Pidgin English, and most young people in China now learn English as a third language alongside their local language (usually referred to as a ‘dialect’) and Standard Mandarin.…”