English Speakers' Acquisition of Voiceless Stops and Trills in L2 Spanish

A study attempted to (1) define acoustically the learner's progress in acquisition of a set of phonological features, specifically interlingual differences in the voice onset time of voiceless stop consonants and the number of taps produced when attempting to produce the Spanish phoneme /r/ (trill); (2) determine if and at what stage of acquisition the given L2 targets are realized; and (3) use data from adult English-speaking learners of Spanish to test Flege's framework of second language speech acquisition known as the Speech Learning Model. Subjects were 40 native English-speaking college students of Spanish. The learners, representing four different proficiency levels, provided data that were analyzed acoustically using computer-based speech analysis software. In addition to tracing the acquisition of a set of sounds through the four levels, the study provides evidence that the Spanish trill is acquired differently than the voiceless stops. Furthermore, Flege's model is shown to be a relevant model of second language speech acquisition with respect to the sounds and language combination examined here. Contains 17 references. (MSE)