Studies in Second Language Acquisition

Table of Contents - 2004 - Volume 26, Issue 04  


BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN L2 SPEECH PERCEPTION RESEARCH AND PHONOLOGICAL THEORY

Paola  Escudero  a1 c1 and Paul  Boersma  a2 c1
a1 Utrecht University
a2 University of Amsterdam

Article author query
escudero p   [Google Scholar] 
boersma p   [Google Scholar] 
 

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. a

(Received March 3 2004)


Correspondence:
c1 Address correspondence to paola.escudero@let.uu.nl or paul.boersma@uva.nl.

Footnotes

a 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).


--