A Longitudinal Study on the Effect of Length of Residence on Chinese Adults' Perception and Production of English /I/-/i/.

It has been subject to debate regarding whether the increase of length of residence (LOR) in a second language (L2) community can facilitate the acquisition of L2 sounds or not (Flege & Fletcher, 1992; Jia et al., 2006). To shed further light on this issue, this study examined 34 Chinese speakers' acquisition of L2-English /I/-/ i/ over 5 years, during which the participants varied in LORs in England. Their perception and production of /I/-/i/ were repeatedly tested with AXB discrimination tasks and read-aloud tasks in 2012 (Test1), 2013 (Test2), 2014 (Test3) and 2017 (Test4). After-test questions were asked to collect information on daily language use during the intervals of two tests. It was found that the participants' perception performance significantly improved during the first year of arrival but "fossilized" from then on. LOR was found to have played a significant effect on their perceptual improvement in Test2 but not in Test3 and Test4. However, findings from the production tests indicated that the "intensive" exposure to native English input during the first year of arrival did not significantly benefit participants' accuracies in producing /I/ in general; LOR was non-significant on their production of /I/ in any of the four tests. Overall, LOR was found to have significantly benefited participants' perception but not production at the first year of arrival, while it did not play a significant effect on perception or production from then on. Findings from the after-test questions suggested that LOR alone can hardly facilitate the acquisition of L2 sounds. Particularly, as hypothesized by SLM-r, the perceived L1-L2 distance and the quantity/quality of L2 input during the period of staying in an L2-speaking community are critical for the success of L2 sounds acquisition (Flege et al., 2021). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]