The Role of Task Complexity and Dominant Articulatory Routines in the Acquisition of L3 Spanish

Abstract

Many studies in L3 phonetics and phonology have found that language dominance plays an influential role in determining the source of transfer. However, any effect of language dominance is likely dependent on many factors, including task complexity. As complexity increases, learners should be increasingly likely to rely on the more automatic articulatory routines from their dominant language. We tested this hypothesis by examining the production patterns of L1 Mandarin–L2 English–L3 Spanish speakers acquiring the Spanish tap and trill, performing a less complex word-reading task and a more complex sentence reading task. The results of the former were reported in a previous study, revealing that the speakers transferred the L2 English [ɹ] and [ɾ] to some extent when acquiring the Spanish rhotics. We hypothesized that such transfer would be less prevalent in the same speakers performing the sentence reading task. The results revealed some support for the hypothesis. Transfer of L2 [ɾ] decreased in the sentence reading task, as did transfer of L2 [ɾ] (in trill productions). L2 [ɹ] substitutes did not vary with task. The results highlight that transfer from previous languages is partially dependent on task. Future work should establish when and to what extent language dominance influences the source of transfer.

Phonological cross-linguistic influence at the initial stages of L3 acquisition

“…In the context of L3 morphosyntax, Hermas (2010) proposed the idea of an exclusive L1 transfer reflecting the order of acquisition, with L1 being the default language from which transfer originates. In the realm of L3 phonological production, this account would be in line with proposals suggesting that L1 phonetic settings represent a fundamental constraint on articulation that results from a speaker's automatized neuro-motor routines (Hammarberg, 2001;Ringbom, 1987), which may be especially evident in early L3 speakers with low L2 proficiency (Patience and Qian, 2022). This was a learning scenario for multilinguals in the present study.…”

“…Instead, the results of the present study are more consistent with studies observing that the L1 is the most likely source of transfer at the initial stages of L3 phonological acquisition (Kopečková, 2014;Llama and Cardoso, 2018;Patience, 2018;Pyun, 2005). One reason for why L1 transfer may persist in the phonetic and phonological domain in a way that is not the case in the morphosyntactic domain could be the neuro-motor routines which tend to be established according to the L1 articulatory patterns, at least for L3 learning contexts in which the learner's L2 was acquired in a formal learning setting and when L2 articulations have not been mastered yet in a consistently target-like manner (see Hammarberg, 2001;Patience and Qian, 2022). The fact that we could find such an overwhelming evidence for final obstruent devoicing in the L3 of all of the learners in the study (as well as in their L2), i.e.…”

“…have a stable mental representation, at the very initial stages of learning. Possibly, our findings depend on the task involved, a delayed repetition task, where speakers might make use of their phonological memory span in order to mimic the sounds heard (for task-related effects, see also Patience and Qian, 2022). It is therefore necessary to replicate our findings with a different task that does not involve any prior listening to the sound in question.…”