Presentation

The Role of Phonological Distributional Information on the Acquisition of L2 Allophones

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Abstract

It has been well attested that infants and adults are able to take advantage of statistical distributional information to acquire phonemes (Maye et al., 2002; Hayes-Harb, 2007) and that infants can learn novel phonological alternations on the basis of phonological distributional information (White et al., 2008). Less is known about the way in which adult second language (L2) learners acquire allophonic relationships. The present study investigates the role of a phonological distributional mechanism in a controlled experimental context. We asked whether naïve subjects were able to utilize phonological distributional information to determine whether two phones belong to separate phonemes or a single phoneme. We exposed native English speakers to one of two artificial languages in which two acoustically similar sounds ([b] and [β]) occurred in either overlapping or complementary distribution. After the exposure phase, participants completed an ABX discrimination task. Unexpectedly, participants did not perform differentially on the task depending on their exposure type, failing to provide evidence for the use of a phonological distributional mechanism in adult L2 allophonic acquisition.

How to Cite:

Barriuso, T. A. & Barrios, S., (2016) “The Role of Phonological Distributional Information on the Acquisition of L2 Allophones”, Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Proceedings 8(1).