Effects of language experience on the discrimination of the Portuguese palatal lateral by nonnative listeners

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to investigate (1) whether manner or place takes precedence over the other during a phonological category discrimination task and (2) whether this pattern of precedence persists during the early stages of acquisition of the L2. In doing so, we investigated the Portuguese palatal lateral approximant /ʎ/ since it differs from English /l/ only by the place of articulation, and from English /j/ only by the manner of articulation. Our results indicate that monolinguals’ perception of the non-native sound is dominated by manner while Portuguese learners show a different pattern of results. The results are interpreted as being consistent with evidence suggesting that manner may be neurophysiologically dominant over place of articulation. The study adds further details to the literature on the effects of experience on language acquisition, and has significant clinical implications for bilingualism in general, and foreign accent training, in particular.

KEYWORDS:

• English
• language learning
• non-native
• phonological categorisation
• Portuguese
• speech discrimination
• speech perception

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notes

¹ Consonants have more complicated acoustic characteristics than vowels. The pertinent acoustic characteristics of the consonants in analysis here will be discussed as appropriate along the paper.

² Articulators are defined, in the Articulatory Phonology theory, as independent and intrinsically distinct constricting devices or organs. Those are the lips, tongue tip, tongue body, tongue root, velum and larynx (Goldstein & Fowler, 2003).

³ The articulatory description of the palatal lateral is based on European Portuguese (EP) productions, because the stimuli used in this study were produced by EP speakers.

⁴ Note that, although Teixeira et al. (2012) described the point of contact of the palatal lateral as being in the alveolo-palatal area, the primary point of constriction is in fact made with the palate. Furthermore, research shows that tongue configuration for /i/, /j/, and /ʎ/ are quite similar. For example, Teixeira and his colleagues (2008) show that tongue contours, derived from MRI images, of /ʎ/ and /i/ are nearly identical. Similarly, /i/ and the semivowel /j/ are generally described in the literature as being highly similar and are primarily distinguished by the duration of transition to the following vowel (cf. Kent & Read, 2002). We therefore treat the place of articulation of /ʎ/ and /j/ as essentially the same.

⁵ Although in most Spanish dialects the palatal lateral approximant has merged into the palatal fricative phoneme /ʝ/, a phonological phenomenon called yeísmo, this phenomenon is present only in certain dialects of more rural and low socio-economic regions of Brazil, and is not observed in European Portuguese (Zampaulo, 2015).

⁶ The participants were not Portuguese monolinguals, but were not actively using a foreign language nor had ever lived for an extended period of time in a country where the main language was not Portuguese. In Portugal it is part of the national school curriculum to learn two foreign languages, the most common being English. Therefore, Portuguese monolinguals are difficult to obtain.

⁷ First author’s translation.

⁸ 40% of the corpus was transcribed by a second coder and inter-reliability was assessed to be above 80%.