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Article In: Journal of Second Language Studies: Online-First Articles

The double phonemic boundary effect in L3 acquisition

The perception of ‘French’ and ‘Hungarian’ stops by Spanish-English bilinguals

 | SUNY Brockport, USA
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Abstract
The present study examined the impact of conceptual cues on the perceptual boundaries of stop consonants in naïve L3 learners. Spanish-English bilinguals in both orders of acquisition categorized the same acoustic /p-b/ continuum three total times and were led to believe they were hearing Spanish, English or a third language unknown to them (French or Hungarian). Although the group results show the L3 boundaries were categorized as Spanish-like, this only held for 18 out of 25 eligible participants, while 7 categorized the L3 as English-like. Regardless of whether participants were told the L3 was French or Hungarian, or their order of acquisition, there were instances of both L1 and L2 perceptual boundaries in L3 perception. These findings suggest the L3 perception may be an individual-level process in which the choice of language-specific boundaries is driven by contextual factors, and L3 perception may not be a one-size-fits-all process.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The present study
  • Methods
    • Participants
    • Materials
    • Stimuli
    • Procedure
    • Statistical analyses
  • Results
    • Group level analysis
    • Individual analysis
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion
  • References
References (62)
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