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Article published In:
Journal of Second Language Studies
Vol. 2:1 (2019) ► pp.1–44

The role of input in native Spanish Late learners’ production and perception of English phonetic segments

| University of Alabama at Birmingham |
| University of Florida |

This study evaluated the effect of input variation on the production and perception of English phonetic segments by native Spanish adults who had immigrated to the United States after the age of 16 years. The native Spanish (NS) participants were assigned to three groups of 20 each according to years of English input (years of U.S. residence multiplied by percent English use outside the home). Experiment 1 assessed the perceived relation between English and Spanish vowels. It yielded similar results for the NS groups designated “Low input” (M = 0.2 years of input), “Mid” (M = 1.2 years) and “High” (M = 3.0 years). Experiments 2–4 examined English vowel discrimination, vowel production and consonant discrimination. Apart from a modest improvement in vowel discrimination, these experiments showed little improvement as years of English input increased. One possible explanation for the essentially null finding of this study is that input matters little or not at all when an L2 is learned naturalistically following the closure of a critical period. Another possibility is that adequate native speaker input is crucial for L2 speech learning but the input differences evaluated here were insufficient to yield measurable improvements in performance. We conclude the article by illustrating a new technique that might be used to choose between these competing explanations.

Keywords: L2, English, Spanish, production, perception, phonetic segments, SLM, critical period, ESM, EMA
Article outline
  • The present study
    • General methods
      • Participants
      • Procedures
  • Experiment 1.Cross language mapping
    • Method
      • Stimuli
      • Procedure
    • Results
      • Classification
      • Not Spanish
      • Goodness of fit
  • Experiment 2.The discrimination of English vowels
    • Method
      • Stimuli
      • Procedure
      • Results and discussion
  • Experiment 3.Production of English vowels
    • Method
    • Auditory evaluation
    • Result and discussion
  • Experiment 4.Consonant discrimination
    • Method
    • Results and discussion
  • General discussion
    • Learning English /p t k/
    • Evaluating the role of input in L2 speech learning
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 18 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jsls.00004.fle
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