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The current study investigates whether some of the variation in h-production observed among Quebec francophone (QF) learners of English could follow from their at times assimilating /h/ to /ʁ/. In earlier research, we attributed variation exclusively to QFs developing an approximate (“fuzzy” or “murky”) representation of /h/ that is not fully reliable as a base for h-perception and production. Nonetheless, two previous studies observed via event-related potentials differences in QF perceptual ability, which may follow from the quality of the vowel used in the stimuli: /ɑ/ vs. /ʌ/ (detection vs. no detection of /h/). Before the vowel /ɑ/, /h/ exhibits phonetic properties that may allow it to be assimilated to and thus underlyingly represented as /ʁ/. If /h/ is at times subject to approximate representation (e.g., before /ʌ/) and at others captured as /ʁ/ (before /ɑ/), we would expect production of /h/ to reflect this representational distinction, with greater accuracy rates in items containing /ɑ/. Two-way ANOVAs and paired Bayesian t-tests on the reading-aloud data of 27 QFs, however, reveal no difference in h-production according to vowel type. We address the consequences of our findings, discussing notably why QFs have such enduring difficulty acquiring /h/ despite the feature [spread glottis] being available in their representational repertoire. We propose the presence of a Laryngeal Input Constraint that renders representations containing only a laryngeal feature highly marked. We also consider the possibility that, rather than having overcome this constraint, some highly advanced learners are “phonological zombies”: these learners become so adept at employing approximate representations in perception and production that they are indistinguishable from speakers with bona fide phonemic representations.

This study examines the acoustic realization of rhotics in Spanish onset clusters in 10 native speakers and 25 second language learners (L2) with English as their L1. The comparison of rhotic manner, duration, and svarabhakti vowel occurrence shows partial evidence of English transfer in the L2 group, since fricative, retroflex approximant and coarticulated variants, common in English, account for almost 40% of realizations. Rhotics are also longer in the L2 group and svarabhakti vowels less frequent. Results also show that stop voicing and place of articulation impact rhotic realization in the L2 group. The examination of individual patterns shows that some L2 learners are in initial stages of rhotic acquisition, while others are approaching the native pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies in the acquisition of a second language (L2) phonology have revealed that orthography can influence the way in which L2 learners come to establish target-like lexical representations (Escudero et al., 2008, 2014; Escudero and Wanrooij, 2010; Showalter, 2012; Showalter and Hayes-Harb, 2013). Most of these studies, however, involve language pairs relying on Roman-based scripts. In comparison, the influence of a foreign or unfamiliar written representation on L2 phonological acquisition remains understudied. The present study therefore considers the effects of three L2 scripts on the early acquisition of an Arabic consonantal contrast word-initially (e.g. /ħal/–/χal/). Monolingual native speakers of English with no prior knowledge of Arabic participated in a word-learning experiment where they were instructed to learn six pairs of minimally contrastive words, each associated with a unique visual referent. Participants were assigned to one of four learning conditions: no orthography, Arabic script, Cyrillic script, and Roman/Cyrillic blended script. After an initial learning phase, participants were then tested on their phonological knowledge of these L2 minimal pairs. The results show that the degree of script unfamiliarity does not in itself seem to significantly affect the successful acquisition of this particular phonological contrast. However, the presence of certain foreign scripts in the course of phonological acquisition can yield significantly different learning outcomes in comparison to having no orthographic representation available. Specifically, the Arabic script exerted an inhibitory effect on L2 phonological acquisition, while the Cyrillic and Roman/Cyrillic blended scripts exercised differential inhibitory effects based on whether grapheme–phoneme correspondences activated first language (L1) phonological units. Besides revealing, for the first time, that foreign written input can significantly hinder learners’ ability to reliably encode an L2 phonological contrast, this study also provides further evidence for the irrepressible hold of native orthographic rules on L2 phonological acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study deals with the acquisition of the English vocalic contrast /e/ vs. /æ/ by native speakers of the Serbian language, in which this contrast is unfamiliar, and one of the most difficult among monophthongs to be acquired in English as L2 (cf. Paunović 2002; Marković 2007; 2009; 2012). The authors specifically address the questions of how the categories of /e/ and /æ/ are developed in the interlanguage of relatively proficient learners of English. We hypothesize that the acquisition of this contrast is a stage-like process, which starts from a complete assimilation to the category of the L1 vowel /e/, and is further developed on the basis of durational, rather than spectral cues. In order to test this hypothesis, perception and production experiments were carried out in which different durational contexts were observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this pilot study, the speech of 12 adult native speakers of English with intermediate to intermediate-high proficiency in Spanish as a second language (L2) was analyzed to determine whether L2 learners rely on distributional information in the process of L2 speech learning and if so, if similar or dissimilar distributional patterns of sounds are more easily acquired. The parameter for (dis)similarity was set around the notion of structural position in combination with native language (L1) and L2 phonemic inventories. The results show that the subjects were consistently more successful in producing the phonemes with overlapping distributional patterns in L1 and L2 than phonemes whose distribution differed in L1 and L2 as well as novel L2 contrasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]