Relative difficulty in the L2 acquisition of the Spanish dorsal fricative

Abstract

Research on relative difficulty in L2 production has revealed that learners target the most salient parameter when acquiring new sounds (Colantoni & Steele, 2008). For example, L1 English-L2 French learners acquire the more salient fricative manner of the French /ʁ/ before the voicing and duration parameters (Colantoni & Steele, 2007, 2008). Previous work in this framework has not compared the acquisition of place and manner parameters. If the more salient parameter is targeted first, we should expect L2 learners to acquire the manner of articulation before the place of articulation, given that manner is a more salient feature than place (Miller & Nicely, 1955; Bedoin et al., 2013). This hypothesis was tested by investigating the L2 production of the Spanish voiceless dorsal fricative by L1 English speakers living in Madrid, a region in which the fricative has a strident realization (Hualde, 2014) and a uvular place of articulation (Ibabe et al., 2016). Fourteen L1 English-L2 Spanish speakers and 14 native Spanish controls performed a picture description task that elicited the target in two vocalic contexts: [aχe, eχa]. An acoustic analysis revealed that the L2 speakers produced fricatives with a similar amplitude compared to controls. However, in the [eχa] context, the learners produced fricatives with a more anterior place of articulation and less frication. The results are consistent with the finding from previous work that learners focus on the most salient property when learning new segments, and provide further evidence that vocalic context is an important factor in production difficulty.

Relative Difficulty in the Acquisition of the Phonetic Parameters of Obstruent Coda Voicing: Evidence from Mandarin-Speaking Learners of French

“…Whereas L1 experience, the arguable universal use of duration as a cue to linguistic contrasts, and differences in the relative salience of phonetic parameters are all potential explanations of L2 learners’ greater facility with mastering duration, a final factor may explain the learning asymmetry observed both in the present and previous studies, namely, articulatory difficulty. Previous work on L2 production has found that articulatorily complex structures are more difficult to acquire and are produced with lower levels of accuracy ( Colantoni & Steele, 2007 , 2008 ; Patience, 2022 ; Yavas, 1997 ). For example, in Patience (2022) , L1 English–L2 Spanish-speaking participants performed an articulation task from which an articulatory difficulty hierarchy for five Spanish segments [β ɣ ɲ χ r] was derived; this hierarchy was found to be a predictor of accuracy of L1 English–L2 Spanish speech production in a picture description task.…”

“…Previous work on L2 production has found that articulatorily complex structures are more difficult to acquire and are produced with lower levels of accuracy ( Colantoni & Steele, 2007 , 2008 ; Patience, 2022 ; Yavas, 1997 ). For example, in Patience (2022) , L1 English–L2 Spanish-speaking participants performed an articulation task from which an articulatory difficulty hierarchy for five Spanish segments [β ɣ ɲ χ r] was derived; this hierarchy was found to be a predictor of accuracy of L1 English–L2 Spanish speech production in a picture description task. Other studies have also found evidence that articulatory complexity influences L2 speech production.…”

Acoustic characteristics of fricatives in Francoprovençal (Nendaz)

“…By pre-voicing, we mean anticipatory voicing that occurs prior to the release of the lateral consonant into the following vowel (see Asu et al 2015). We also compare: (iii) the relative intensity between the fricative and the following vowel vs. a voiced lateral and the following vowel; and (iv) the ratio of zero-crossings which some scholars have previously investigated as a means of examining the degree of periodicity in the signal (Martinez Céldran 2015, Patience 2018). A custom Praat script (based on that of Elvira-García 2014) was used to extract the number of zero-crossings in the target fricative or lateral, and the following vowel.…”

“…We examine its durational properties relative to other obstruent–lateral clusters as well as to the proportion of voicing relative to noise, and relative intensity. We also compare zero-crossing ratios as a measure of the relative noisiness of the signal to examine how ‘approximant’ or ‘fricative’ like the lateral fricative is on this measure (see Martínez Celdrán 2015, Patience 2018). The results of this study, therefore, not only contribute to the acoustic description of part of the phonetic system of an underexamined and severely endangered language variety, but also serve to contribute to our understanding of fricative acoustics, including of the lateral fricative, cross-linguistically.…”