Allophony in English Language Learners: The Case of Tap in English and Spanish

Abstract

Purpose The objective of this study was to examine tap production by English language learners (ELLs) in kindergarten whose 1st language is Spanish. The conflicting status of tap in Spanish and English could present challenges for allophonic learning in 2nd language for ELLs. Prior research has evaluated acquisition of other allophone pairs, but none has focused exclusively on tap. Method Thirty ELLs, 30 English monolinguals, and 29 Spanish monolinguals participated in the study. Participants completed a single-word repetition task in which numerous opportunities to produce tap were provided. Productions were phonetically transcribed and analyzed. Results The great majority of taps were pronounced correctly in both languages. The allophonic status of tap in English and phonemic status in Spanish suggest ELLs could experience negative transfer in learning; however, this was not observed. A significant interaction indicated more t/d substitutions in English and more semivowel/liquid substitutions in Spanish, contradicting the expectation of negative transfer. ELLs were also significantly more accurate at producing tap in Spanish than English. Conclusion Findings suggest that, at early kindergarten, ELL children rapidly adapted to English patterns of tap production even though Spanish and English conflict in phonemic/allophonic status of tap. This study was preliminary, and further investigation is warranted.

Acquiring allophonic structure and phonetic detail in a bilingual community: The production of laterals by Sylheti-English bilingual children

“…Again, this difference is predictable on phonetic grounds, but we also hypothesised that the allophony of English laterals would cause this difference to be exaggerated, which is supported by our data. This patterns with previous findings that show monolingual-like acquisition of allophony by bilingual speakers in both of their languages (Barlow et al, 2013;Burrows et al, 2019).…”

“…Previous perception research on monolinguals suggests that children may begin to treat phonemes differently from allophones at a young age, with lesser attention paid to non-contrastive allophonic patterns at 11 months compared to 4 months (Seidl et al, 2009). Speech production research shows variable patterns of acquisition, with some studies showing monolingual-like allophony (Burrows et al, 2019) and other contexts showing the reverse (Fabiano-Smith et al, 2015). In contexts where bilingual speakers do reproduce monolingual-like allophony, we may also ask about whether phonetic detail is also monolingual-like.…”

“…This learning spans phonological contrast (differences between phonemes), allophonic structure (contextual differences in a sound) and phonetic detail (the precise details of pronunciation) (Chang, 2015). The majority of research tends to examine just one of these dimensions, with the predominant focus being phonological contrast (Burns, Yoshida, Hill & Werker, 2007;Sundara, Polka & Molnar, 2008) and, to a lesser extent, allophony (Fabiano-Smith, Oglivie, Maiefski & Schertz, 2015;Burrows, Jarmulowicz, & Oller, 2019). However, investigating cross-linguistic systems across multiple levels of a sound system can be highly instructive in better understanding how bilingual phonological repertoires are linked.…”

Analysis of Verbal Language from the Theory of Human Movement as a Complex System

“…The phoneme is an abstract linguistic unit that has in each case a concrete realizationits variants or allophones -determined by various social or geographical factors of variation. The phoneme is the minimal unit of sound that allows us to distinguish words in a language [27,28], while the allophone is a particular acoustic realization of a phoneme, which is usually a positional variety [29,30]. Both can make up a syllable, understood as a sound or set of articulated sounds that occur between two brief and almost imperceptible interruptions in the exit of air from the lungs in the emission of voice.…”

Improving Phoneme to Viseme Mapping for Indonesian Language

“…Whereas English as an international language also has allophones, especially when spoken by people from countries that do not use English as a national language. For example, English is spoken by Javanese [15] or by Spanish [16], and vice versa, the person in the main Englishspeaking languages who speak Korean [17].…”