Whose Input Matters? The influence of socially-differentiated input sources in adult Lx phonetic learning

Abstract

Input is a necessary condition for language acquisition, and in the language classroom, input may come from a variety of sources, including the teacher and student peers. Here we ask whether adult Lx learners are sensitive to the social roles of teachers and students such that they exhibit a preference for input from the teacher. We conducted an experiment wherein adult English speakers heard words in an artificial language. During an exposure phase, in one condition a “teacher” produced words with 25 ms of VOT on initial stop segments and a “student” produced the same words with 125 msec, and in another condition the VOT durations were reversed. At test, participants judged productions by a different “student” and demonstrated a preference for the productions that matched the VOT durations of the teacher during exposure, providing evidence for an influence of social factors in differentiating input in Lx acquisition.

Development of production skills in the absence of precise phonolexical representations

“…palatalized consonants are not replaced by plain consonants in the speech of Russian native speakers) can act as a reinforcement – or perhaps the exemplars obtained from Russian native speakers are ‘more important’, and given more weight, than the ego-exemplars or those heard from peers (e.g. Hayes-Harb et al, 2021).…”

Abandoning inauthentic intersectionality

“…The introduction of social knowledge into linguistic tasks can fundamentally alter perceptual outcomes by interacting with virtually every level of linguistic analysis, including phoneme identification (Evans et al, 2018; Strand & Johnson, 1996), lexical ambiguity resolution (Nygaard & Lunders, 2002), syntactic processing (Casasanto, 2008), discourse comprehension (Rubin, 1992), and the expression of accent preferences (Hayes-Harb et al, 2021; Kang & Rubin, 2009). To further complicate things, engaging as psycholinguists with the multiplicity of identity requires careful attention to how definitions of social groups morph across different contexts, resulting in differing levels of scrutiny (Plaut, 2010; Settles & Buchanan, 2014).…”

“…Modern intersectional scholarship illuminates the way oppressions which have been commonly discussed as independent of race have historically been leveraged as moralistic and racist technologies of anti-Blackness, including antifatness (Harrison, 2021) and disability, which has historically positioned "faculty [as] the greatest virtue" and "self-sufficiency [as] the absence of Blackness" (Horvath-Williams, personal communication, February 3, 2022).…”