This cross-sectional study of the interlanguage phonology of adult English-speaking learners of Spanish purports to provide a quantifiable description of several levels of attainment of the Spanish vowel system, the consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, /s/, /r/, and , and phonemically contrastive amplitude. It also evaluates the predictive power of the Speech Learning Model (Flege, 1988, 1995) and the Developmental Model (Wode, 1995) for the data and compares these two models to other theoretical views of second language speech acquisition.
Digitized recorded speech data were taken from 70 native English speakers learning or teaching Spanish in a U. S. university. Speech samples, which were collected from each participant using two elicitation protocols, were also taken from five native Spanish speakers for comparison. The English-speaking Spanish learners, all of whom reported no significant exposure to Spanish prior to age 12, were recruited to represent beginning, intermediate, advanced, and very advanced levels of Spanish learners. A computer-based speech analysis program was used to obtain over 2,600 instrumentally gathered speech measurements. These measurements focused on learner production attempts of Spanish vowels in stressed and unstressed contexts, stop consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, sibilant /s/, realization of orthographic , trill /r/, and amplitude of stressed vs. unstressed syllables.
This work provides a thorough acoustic description of the acquisition of the above L2 Spanish phonetic features among a population of adult English speaking learners by indicating the levels at which the L2 Spanish sounds are realized within the parameters established by analysis of native speaker data. Additionally, it describes how a failure to find phonological fossilization questions the applicability of interlanguage theory to L2 speech acquisition and discusses why the Speech Learning Model and Developmental Model are preferable to other hypotheses and models of L2 phonological acquisition with respect to the data gathered in this study.
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