The role of cognates in conditioning phonological crosslinguistic influence on Portuguese as a third language

Abstract

This study of phonology in Third Language Acquisition investigates the role of localised, lexical similarity in conditioning the source of phonological crosslinguistic influence on L3 production. It examines learners of L3 Portuguese who are native speakers of English with a Romance second language.

The study analyses participants’ ability to discriminate and produce several speech sounds across their three languages, with a focus on fortis plosives, the vowels [æ, a, ɐ, o, ɔ, ɒ, u, e, ə], and the pre-palatal affricate /ʧ/ and fricative /ʃ/. 12 UK university students studying L3 Portuguese, with L1 English and L2 French or Spanish completed a Language Questionnaire, Aural Perception Tasks, and Oral Production Tasks at three time phases over 8 months. The Language Questionnaire evaluated participants’ perceptions of language distance between their L3 and their background languages and their desires to suppress or encourage CLI in their L3 Portuguese production. The Aural Perception Tasks examined CLI in aural perception, and the Oral Production Tasks elicited target L1, L2 and L3 speech sounds from participants produced in real words both in isolation and in a sentence-embedded context.
Results suggest that localised lexical similarity has an impact on CLI source language selection, that L3 learners’ perceptions of language similarity are not made on a macro scale, and that CLI occurs selectively from both the L1 and the L2. It is argued that the current models of L3A cannot fully account for phonological CLI in L3A, and it is suggested that L3 phonology be considered in a framework which combines L3 theory with models of aural perception.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Jaine Beswick: orcid.org/0000-0002-1866-939X

ORCID for Roumyana Slabakova: orcid.org/0000-0002-5839-460X

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