The Role of Structural Position in L2 Phonological Acquisition: Evidence from English Learners of Spanish as L2

Vokic, Gabriela

doi:10.1111/j.1944-9720.2008.tb03296.x

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…That is, for instance, less frequent consonants and PSs in English should be more focused on in teaching English in EFL contexts. To be more elaborative, the impact of L1 phonetic dissimilarity on L2 learner's acquisition of L2 phonetic segments (Aoyama, Flege, Guion, Akhame-Yamada, & Yamada, 2004), the effect of the frequency of L1 input on successful L2 pronunciation (Aliaga-García, 2007), the effect of phoneme and feature frequency on the order of acquisition of consonants (Yamaguchi, 2007) and the effect of overlapping distributional patterns in L1 and L2 on phoneme production (Vokic, 2008) support the pedagogical importance of the phonetic frequency.…”

Section: Discussion Conclusion and Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Frequency System of Phonemes: Contrastive Analysis of Common Standard Persian and English Consonants in Context-Based Corpora

Nejad¹,

Qaracholloo²

2013

ASS

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This paper is concerned with the contrastive analysis of the frequency system of common standard Persian and English consonants. Two corpora were selected from Iranian newspapers. One of them is Keyhan newspaper that is published in Persian and the other one is Tehran Times newspaper that goes under press in English in Iran. Common standard Persian and English consonants were enumerated and analyzed by themselves and with respect to parts of speech, manner of articulation and place of articulation. Results indicated a significant difference between the frequency of eleven Persian consonants and their English counterparts. Nouns comprised the highest frequency of consonants and while prepositions, determiners and conjunctions had the lowest. With respect to manner of articulation, there was a significant difference between both languages in all manners with stops as the most frequent in both. As for the place of articulation, there was a significant difference between both languages and alveolars were the most frequent in both. Regarding manner of articulation, English stops and liquids were more frequent than those of Persian. With respect to place of articulation, just English alveolars were more frequent than the Persian ones. The frequency of all other places was higher in Persian. In spite of frequent differences between both languages, many similarities were also identified in terms of their frequency systems, and the frequency of consonants with respect to parts of speech, manner of articulation and place of articulation.

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Section: Discussion Conclusion and Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Frequency System of Phonemes: Contrastive Analysis of Common Standard Persian and English Consonants in Context-Based Corpora

Nejad¹,

Qaracholloo²

2013

ASS

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“…Previous research has found however that L1's phonotactic properties in general, and the syllabic structure more specifically, do carry over in the acquisition of another language (for instance see Onishi et al 2002, Trammel 1993, Sato 1984, Delattre 1965. In a study that involved English learners of Spanish, Vokic (2008) found that distributional differences between the L2 and L1 phonemes contributed to explaining how successful learners were in producing phonemes in the target language. In a production task, learners were more successful when the distributional properties of the L2 phonemes overlapped those of the L1's phonemes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Glide Insertion in French Hiatus for Arabic Learners of French as a Foreign Language

Guilbault

Alioua

2022

Virtual PSLLT

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Arabic learners of French as a second language have been known to produce French hiatus sequences with an epenthetic glide between the two vowels such as in [pejaʒ] for "péage" and [nejɔ ] for "neon". This study attempts to investigate and document this phenomenon by looking at phonetic transcriptions of French words containing V-V sequences within and across word boundaries. The first part of this exploratory study required Arabic learners to transcribe a series of isolated words using IPA to see if they would insert glides. In the second part, learners were invited to record short sentences containing V-V sequences within and across word boundaries to confirm their presence acoustically. Results show a clear tendency for most learners to insert a glide in the phonetic transcription of V1V2 sequences; [j] is inserted if V1 is front and [w] is added if V2 is back. Those glides are also present in recorded sentences as demonstrated in the brief acoustical analysis performed on complete sentences. The final section discusses the possibility that these epenthetic segments may be due to differences between the syllable structures of L1 (Arabic) and French.

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“…While there are no L1 studies to our knowledge that specifically examine word position and spirantization, it has been shown, for example, that English-speaking children acquire fricatives first in word-medial position (Edwards, 1979). As Vokic (2008) notes, structural position may also correlate with ease of acquisition in L2 learning. For example, Major (1986) indicates that perception of rhotics can vary according to structural position, and reports that the few learners in his study that produced a native-like trill, did so only in word-medial position.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of prosodic structure in the L2 acquisition of Spanish stop lenition

Amaro

2017

Second Language Research

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This study tests the hypothesis that late first-language English / second-language Spanish learners (L1 English / L2 Spanish learners) acquire spirantization in stages according to the prosodic hierarchy (Zampini, 1997, 1998). In Spanish, voiced stops [b d g] surface after a pause or nasal stop, and continuants [β̞ ð̞ ɣ̞] surface postvocalically, among other contexts. We adopt an Optimality Theoretic analysis of the phenomenon that assumes that postvocalic continuants surface due to the ranking of prosodic positional faithfulness constraints below a markedness constraint that prohibits stops in postvocalic position. L1 English speakers are presumed to start with a ranking in which prosodic positional faithfulness outranks the markedness constraint. In line with the Gradual Learning Algorithm (Boersma and Hayes, 2001), gradual demotion of the relevant faithfulness constraints is predicted in L2 Spanish, extending the prosodic domain until continuants surface postvocalically across domains. A cross-section of 44 L1 English / L2 Spanish learners and a control group ( n = 5) completed a recitation task, and data were analysed acoustically for manner of articulation and degree of constriction. Results partially align with Zampini’s impressionistic data: Learners first produce underlying stops as postvocalic approximants at the onset of the syllable (word-medial position), followed by the onset of the prosodic word (word-initial position). Unlike Zampini’s findings, there is no evidence for an intermediate stage of acquisition across the boundary of a word and its clitic. Advanced L2 learners produce continuants in postvocalic position at all applicable prosodic levels, which we take to indicate acquisition of the target ranking. We also examined whether learners’ postvocalic continuants are lenited to the same degree as the control group, and whether degree of lenition changes across development. The difference in degree of lenition between controls and learners lessens at higher levels of the prosodic hierarchy as acquisition progresses, and several advanced learners produce target-like segments across prosodic levels.

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The Role of Structural Position in L2 Phonological Acquisition: Evidence from English Learners of Spanish as L2

Cited by 7 publications

References 21 publications

Frequency System of Phonemes: Contrastive Analysis of Common Standard Persian and English Consonants in Context-Based Corpora

Frequency System of Phonemes: Contrastive Analysis of Common Standard Persian and English Consonants in Context-Based Corpora

Glide Insertion in French Hiatus for Arabic Learners of French as a Foreign Language

The role of prosodic structure in the L2 acquisition of Spanish stop lenition

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