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BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN L2 SPEECH PERCEPTION RESEARCH AND PHONOLOGICAL THEORY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2004

Paola Escudero  and
Paul Boersma
Paola Escudero
Affiliation:
Utrecht University
Paul Boersma
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam
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Abstract

A series of experiments shows that Spanish learners of English acquire the ship-sheep contrast in a way specific to their target dialect (Scottish or Southern British English) and that many learners exhibit a perceptual strategy found in neither Spanish nor English. To account for these facts as well as for the findings of earlier research on second language (L2) speech perception, we provide an Optimality Theoretic model of phonological categorization that comes with a formal learning algorithm for its acquisition. Within this model, the dialect-dependent and L2-specific facts provide evidence for the hypotheses of Full Transfer and Full Access.We would like to thank the audiences of the 25th Penn Linguistics Colloquium (Philadelphia, 2001), Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition 2001 (Palmela), and EuroSLA 11 (Paderborn, 2001) and of talks in Lisbon, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Utrecht, and Munich, all in 2001 as well, for their questions and remarks, and Rachel Hayes, Michael Sharwood Smith, and five anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. This research was partially sponsored by grant 355-75-003 to Boersma from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , December 2004 , pp. 551 - 585
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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