Imitation in a Second Language Relies on Phonological Categories but Does Not Reflect the Productive Usage of Difficult Sound Contrasts

Abstract

This study investigated the relationship between imitation and both the perception and production abilities of second language (L2) learners for two non-native contrasts differing in their expected degree of difficulty. German learners of English were tested on perceptual categorization, imitation and a word reading task for the difficult English /ɛ/-/æ/ contrast, which tends not to be well encoded in the learners’ phonological inventories, and the easy, near-native /i/-/ɪ/ contrast. As expected, within-task comparisons between contrasts revealed more robust perception and better differentiation during production for /i/-/ɪ/ than /ɛ/-/æ/. Imitation also followed this pattern, suggesting that imitation is modulated by the phonological encoding of L2 categories. Moreover, learners’ ability to imitate /ɛ/ and /æ/ was related to their perception of that contrast, confirming a tight perception-production link at the phonological level for difficult L2 sound contrasts. However, no relationship was observed between acoustic measures for imitated and read-aloud tokens of /ɛ/ and /æ/. This dissociation is mostly attributed to the influence of inaccurate non-native lexical representations in the word reading task. We conclude that imitation is strongly related to the phonological representation of L2 sound contrasts, but does not need to reflect the learners’ productive usage of such non-native distinctions.

Phonetic categorization ability and vocabulary size contribute to the encoding of difficult second-language phonological contrasts into the lexicon

“…A two-alternative forced-choice task (2AFC) assessed the learners' phonetic categorization of the /ε/-/ae/ contrast. The task used here was the same as the one described in Llompart and Reinisch (2019a). A 21-step bet-bat continuum was created in Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2010) from natural productions from the same speaker who recorded the words for the lexical decision task.…”

“…Performance in the phonetic categorization task was measured by calculating the steepness (i.e., slope) of the /ε/-/ae/ categorization curve. Following Llompart and Reinisch (2019a), individual slopes were calculated by submitting the categorization data to a generalized linear mixed-effects regression model with a logistic linking function (lme4 package 1.1-20, Bates, Mächler, Bolker & Walker, 2015) in R (Version 3. 5.…”

“…In principle, it is sensible to expect a relationship between the two because some degree of differentiation of the phonetic properties of the phones should be a prerequisite for a distinction to be encoded into the lexicon (Darcy et al, 2013;Darcy & Holliday, 2019;Simonchyk & Darcy, 2017, but see Cutler, 2015. However, the few studies that have indeed looked into relationships between individual patterns of performance for tasks tapping into phonetic categorization and phonolexical encoding have provided rather mixed results (Darcy & Holliday, 2019;Llompart & Reinisch, 2019a;Silbert et al, 2015;Simonchyk & Darcy, 2017). For example, Darcy and Holliday (2019) report a strong and significant correlation, for Chinese learners of Korean, between their accuracy in a /o/-/ʌ/ vowel identification task and a lexical decision task containing /o/-/ʌ/ words and nonwords.…”

My English sounds better than yours: Second-language learners perceive their own accent as better than that of their peers

“…They tested how well German learners can comprehend German-accented English, with the crucial manipulation whether learners were listening to their own voice or someone else's English. This was tested with minimal word pairs containing phonological contrasts that are typically close to neutralized in German-accented English [7,8,9,10]. [7] showed that most German learners did not produce the contrast as native speakers do, however, they did not neutralize it either.…”

The role of vowel length and glottalization in German learners’ perception of the English coda stop voicing contrast

“…However, no overall differences could be found between the two groups for either the use of the familiar cue of vowel duration or the 'unfamiliar' cue of glottalization. Note, however, that although such group-level differences are typically easier to detect than correlations at the individual learner level (e.g., Llompart & Reinisch, in press), ratings from language background questionnaires rarely predict effects in phonetic tasks-likely due to the overall good performance and relatively small variability in phonetic tasks (compared to lexical tasks; Eger & Reinisch, 2017;Llompart & Reinisch, 2019).…”