Second language learning of phonological alternations with and without orthographic input: Evidence from the acquisition of a German-like voicing alternation

Abstract

While a growing body of research investigates the influence of orthographic input on the acquisition of second language (L2) segmental contrasts, few studies have examined its influence on the acquisition of L2 phonological processes. Hayes-Harb, Brown, and Smith (2018) showed that exposure to words’ written forms caused native English speakers to misremember the voicing of final obstruents in German-like words exemplifying voicing neutralization. However, they did not examine participants’ acquisition of the final devoicing process. To address this gap, we conducted two experiments wherein native English speakers (assigned to Orthography or No Orthography groups) learned German-like words in suffixed and unsuffixed forms, and later completed a picture naming test. Experiment 1 investigated learners’ knowledge of the surface voicing of obstruents in both final and nonfinal position, and revealed that while all participants produced underlyingly voiced obstruents as voiceless more often in final than nonfinal position, the difference was only significant for No Orthography participants. Experiment 2 investigated participants’ ability to apply the devoicing process to new words, and provided no evidence of generalization. Together these findings shed light on the acquisition of final devoicing by naïve adult learners, as well as the influence of orthographic input in the acquisition of a phonological alternation.

The influence of orthography in second language phonological acquisition

“…Moreover, participants who were exposed to orthographic input were more likely than participants who were not to incorrectly produce underlyingly voiced words as voiced in their unsuffixed forms, as was also reported by Hayes-Harb et al (2018). However, unlike the previous study, Barrios and Hayes-Harb (2020) also uncovered a potential advantage of exposure to orthographic input during the acquisition of a phonological process. That is, the orthography group was found to correctly produce underlyingly voiced words as voiced in their suffixed forms, suggesting that orthographic input, while misleading with respect to the surface realizations of alternating words, may provide a helpful clue to words’ underlying forms.…”

“…Building on these findings, Barrios and Hayes-Harb (2020) investigated whether the interfering effect of orthographic input is observed when naïve learners are exposed to alternating and non-alternating surface forms in both their suffixed and unsuffixed form, which has been argued to provide the essential evidence for whether a learner has acquired a phonological alternation (Young-Scholten, 2002, p. 268). In the study, in addition to observing auditory evidence that underlyingly voiced final obstruents are produced as voiceless in unsuffixed forms (e.g., /tʁob/ pronounced [tʁop] and spelled <trob>), participants were also exposed to the voiced alternants of alternating words (e.g., /tʁoben/ pronounced [tʁoben] and spelled <troben>).…”

Fuzzy Lexical Representations in Adult Second Language Speakers

“…L2 learners need to overcome the influence of L1 in developing the L2 phonological system and new form-meaning mappings for L2 LRs. The specific difficulties in L2 lexical encoding of both form and meaning can often be traced to a particular combination of L1 and L2 ( Jarvis, 2000 ; Barrios and Hayes-Harb, 2020 , 2021 ; Llompart, 2021 ). For example, an L1 German speaker may not encode the difference in the English words cod and cot due to final consonant devoicing in German, while encoding this difference will not present a problem to an L1 French speaker.…”

Accent Difference Makes No Difference to Phoneme Acquisition

“…In addition to visual articulatory speech information, paralinguistic features such as gestures, distance and/or physical contact between interlocutors, and prosody further aid comprehension (Hoven, 1999). However, orthographic information may actually interfere with phonological acquisition where L1 and L2 phonology and orthography pairings are incongruent (Hayes Harb & Barrios, 2021;Barrios & Hayes Harb, 2020;Mathieu, 2016), which means closed captions may not be beneficial for this purpose. Therefore, when using multimodal input one must ensure that the different modalities work to facilitate the second language acquisition process rather than interfere.…”