The Perception of Postalveolar English Obstruents by Spanish Speakers Learning English as a Foreign Language in Mexico

Abstract

The present study deals with the perception (identification and discrimination) of an English phonemic contrast (/t∫/–/∫/, as in cheat and sheet) by speakers of two Mexican varieties of Spanish who are learning English as a foreign language. Unlike English, Spanish does not contrast /t∫/ and /∫/ phonemically. Most Spanish varieties have [t∫], but not [∫]. In northwestern Mexico, [∫] and [t∫] find themselves in a situation of “free” variation—perhaps conditioned, to some extent, by social factors, but not in complementary distribution. In this variety, [∫] and [t∫] are variants of the same phoneme. The present study compares the perceptual behavior of English learners from northwestern Mexico, with that of learners from central Mexico, whose native dialect includes only [t∫]. The results of a word-categorization task show that both groups of learners find cheat and sheet difficult to identify in the context of each other, but that, relative to the other learner group, the group of learners in northwestern Mexico find this task to be particularly challenging. The results of a categorical discrimination task show that both learner groups find the members of the /t∫/–/∫/ contrast difficult to discriminate. On average, accuracy is lower for the group of learners in northwestern Mexico than it is for the central Mexicans. The findings suggest that the phonetic variants found in one’s native dialect modulate the perception of nonnative sounds and, consequently, that people who speak different regional varieties of the same language may face different obstacles when learning the sounds of their second language.

The Influence of Native Phonology, Allophony, and Phonotactics on Nonnative Lexical Encoding: A Vocabulary Training Study

“…More specifically, consistent with one L1‐Spanish L2‐English study that reported a one‐allophone L1 variety advantage over the two‐allophone L1 variety with free allophonic variation in a scenario of L1–L2 allophonic split (López Velarde & Simonet, 2020), Chinese L1 speakers in our study who preferred to consistently use [w] rather than both allophones also enjoyed a clear advantage in correctly perceiving and lexicalizing the L2 /v/–/w/ contrast. Indeed, having one L1 phonemic category with a lot of variation makes it harder to separate that space into two separate L2 categories.…”

“…Whereas previous findings support the role played by the L1 phonological category that is phonetically similar to its L2 counterpart in establishing a L2 dominant category, not much has been done on a learning scenario with a particularly high degree of difficulty, that involving an allophonic split, where the learners’ L1 has both phones but lacks the phonological contrast, that is, separate phonemes in the L2 are allophones of the same phoneme in the L1 (Eckman et al., 2003; López Velarde & Simonet, 2020). Moreover, little is known about whether L1 phonotactic rules can constrain the learning patterns for problematic L2 contrasts (see, however, Weber & Cutler, 2006, a study demonstrating the role of L1 phonotactics in the segmenting of continuous speech in the L2); this study aims to explore this novel issue under the allophonic split learning scenario in order to investigate the role of L1 phonology, allophony, phonotactics, and memory consolidation in the phonolexical encoding of novel words with problematic L2 contrasts.…”

“…Phonetically, the Chinese [ʋ] is close to the English /v/, and the [w] in Chinese is almost the same as the English /w/ (see Wiener & Shih, 2013). This constitutes a scenario of an allophonic split, in which difficulties in perceiving the L2 contrast have been reported mostly for allophonic variation in complementary distribution (Barrios et al., 2016; Eckman et al., 2003; Shea, 2014) and, rarely, in free variation (López Velarde & Simonet, 2020).…”

“…Whereas there is considerable experimental support for the fuzziness at different levels of lexical representation in novel L2 word learning, little is known about how L1 allophonic variation may influence L2 phonological and, particularly, lexical encoding (Barrios et al., 2016; Eckman et al., 2003; López Velarde & Simonet, 2020; Shea, 2014). Against this background, the current study explores how L1 Mandarin Chinese speakers with English as their L2 learn novel English‐like /v/‐ and /w/‐initial words after a short training period and again after 24‐hour consolidation.…”