sequential articulation in L2

[Ping Li]

Dear Colleagues,

A student of mine is interested in doing some work on L2 phonological
acquisition/production. So far it seems that most of the literature on
perceived accent in a foreign language is on the segmental level such
as the vowel quality or VOT of consonants (e.g., James Flege's work).
There is also recent evidence that prosodic structure may be an
important dimension.

One intuitive impression of mine is that often a L2 speaker is able to
pronounce the individual phonemes accurately in isolation, but when it
comes to assemble the phonemes in a word, or to put several words
together, problems would occur that make the speaker sound non-native.
In other words, individual vowels or consonants can be produced to near
native accuracy, but the coordination of sound sequences causes the
trouble in perceived accent. I have communicated this idea with several
colleagues in L2 phonological acquisition, and they seem to indicate
that there might be some truth to the idea. Unfortunately I could not
find  solid studies that would confirm or disconfirm this impression. I
myself am not very well informed of studies in L2 phonological
acquisition. Hence I am writing to ask if you could provide some
pointers or references.

If the problem of L2 accent lies in the sequential articulation (more
so than in producing individual phonemes), then one can hypothesize
that there may be some maturational constraints to the ability of motor
planning and programming, or control of speech apparatus, in early vs.
late bilingual learners. One can also predict that children are better
at saying tongue twisters than adults. A wide open question...

Thanks for any pointers or insights.

Ping Li


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Ping Li, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Graduate Program Coordinator
Department of Psychology
University of Richmond
Richmond, VA 23173, USA
Email: pli at richmond.edu
http://www.richmond.edu/~pli/
http://cogsci.richmond.edu/

Bilingualism: Language and Cognition:
http://cogsci.richmond.edu/bilingualism/bilingualism.html
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