Articulatory Insights into the L2 Acquisition of English-/l/ Allophony.
Laura Colantoni, Alexei Kochetov, Jeffrey Steele
PMID 38031458WHAT IT FOUND
French and Spanish learners of English acquired the broad pattern of light and dark /l/ sounds but did not match native speakers in how they physically produced them.
Learners changed tongue tip contact more than tongue back movement, and individual differences were large.
Key findings
01Learners of French and Spanish origin successfully produced the general positional difference between onset and coda /l/ sounds, but their specific articulatory movements differed from native English speakers.
02The primary articulatory change for learners involved reducing tongue tip contact in coda positions, while tongue back contact patterns remained largely similar to their first language.
03Native English speakers showed previously unreported variability, with many coda /l/ sounds in clusters produced with no tongue-palate contact at all.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample size was very small (10 speakers total), with only three speakers per language group, limiting generalizability. The groups were not balanced for gender, with most learners being female and controls including males, which confounds acoustic results. There was a confound between L1 and proficiency/immersion, as the Spanish learners had more years in English-speaking environments than the French learners. The study did not control for adjacent vowel context or stress in the stimuli.
Declared interests
The work was partly funded by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a University of Toronto Faculty of Arts & Science Advancing Teaching and Learning in Arts and Science (ATLAS) grant. No commercial conflicts of interest were declared.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the learners' successful production of the onset-coda distinction as evidence that they have acquired native-like articulatory motor patterns. The study shows that learners can achieve the broad phonological goal while using significantly different tongue contact strategies than native speakers.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →