The acquisition of L2 allophonic variants: The role of phonological distribution and lexical cues

Abstract

Adult learners acquire second language (L2) allophones with experience. We examine two mechanisms which may support the acquisition of allophonic variants in second language acquisition. One of the mechanisms is based on the distribution of phones with respect to their phonological context (i.e. phonological distribution). The other is based on the role the phones play in contrasting words (i.e. lexical contrast). Experiment 1 established adult native English speakers’ baseline sensitivity to the novel [b]–[β] auditory contrast. In Experiment 2 we examined whether adult native English speakers infer the phonological status of [b] and [β] in an artificial language based only on their distributions to phonological contexts. We observed no evidence that these participants were able to do so. In Experiment 3 we investigated whether learners infer the phonological status of [b] and [β] from the role they play in lexical contrast and observed both perceptual and lexical processing evidence to suggest that adults may use meaning-based cues to the lack of contrast to learn that two phones are allophones of the same phoneme. Together our findings suggest that adult L2 learners may prioritize information about function (in this case, lexical contrast) over the phonological distribution of phones as they determine the phonological status of L2 sounds.

Language-specific distributional learning advantages in Singapore English-Mandarin bilingual adults

“…Existing studies have shown that adults typically experience more difficulty in perceiving acoustic differences in novel, non-native, phoneme contrasts as compared to children and infants (e.g., Best & Strange, 1992), and are generally poorer at extracting distributional cues from training stimuli (e.g., Wanrooij et al, 2014). This is likely related to the manner in which language learning strategies shift from distributional learning with age, with adults typically favouring the use of more salient acoustic and lexical cues for the acquisition of novel speech sound contrasts (Barrios et al, 2022;Hayes-Harb, 2007;Liu, et al 2022;Werker, 2018). As the study we adapted was originally conducted on Grade 3 Dutch children (Vandermosten et al, 2018), children in the original study were likely more sensitive to the differences in dental-retroflex ambiguity in the stimuli, and would have been more adept at extracting distributional cues from the training set in a much shorter period of time.…”

“…In the case of Escudero and colleagues, the participants had already begun learning Dutch or were living in the Netherlands, and would therefore have had relevant prior exposure to the Dutch /ɑ/-/aː/ vowel contrast that they were trained on in the studies (Escudero et al, 2011;Escudero and Williams, 2014;Wanrooij et al, 2013). On the other hand, adults who were trained on completely novel speech sounds which did not have any structural overlaps with the languages in their repertoires appear to have been unable to utilise distributional cues for learning, instead focusing on more salient cues at hand such as acoustic cues (e.g., Liu et al 2022), andlexical cues (Hayes-Harb, 2007;Barrios et al, 2022).…”