University of Maryland School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Home

One challenge of learning a second or additional language (L2C) is learning to perceive and interpret its sounds. This includes acquiring the target language (TL) contrastive phonemic inventory, the sounds’ systematic behavior
in the TL phonology, and novel relationships between spelling and sound (GPCs; grapheme-phoneme correspondences). Many perception tasks require  stipulation of written labels for target speech sounds (e.g., phoneme detection). Listening for this target is not necessarily, or even frequently, an equivalent cognitive task between participant groups. The incongruence of phonological and orthographic domains and their GPCs poses a methodological challenge for L2C research. The author argues that phoneme detection tasks should avoid the phone of investigative interest (x) as the direct target of listener attention and redirect focus to an adjacent listening target (y). Ideally, this target should not trigger or otherwise be implicated in the phonological process or phonotactic
constraint under investigation. The careful choice of listening target (y) with both a familiar sound and a congruent orthographic label for both (or all) language groups of the experiment yields an equivalent task and better indicates implicit knowledge of the phenomenon under study. This approach opens up potential choices of phonological objects of interest (x). The two phoneme detection experiments reported here employ this novel adjacent-congruent listening target approach, which the author calls the Persean approach. Experiment 1 establishes baseline performance in two assimilation types and replicates processing inhibition in first-language (L1) German speakers in response to violations of regressive nasal assimilation. It also uses [t] as the Persean listening target to test sensitivity to preceding violations of progressive dorsal fricative assimilation (DFA). Experiment 2 investigates sensitivity to violations of DFA in both L1 German speakers and L1 English L2C German learners. Experiment 2 also uses the Persean method for the first phoneme detection investigation demonstrating sensitivity to violation of a prosodic/phonotactic constraint banning /h/ in syllable codas. The study demonstrates that phoneme detection with Persean listening targets is a viable instrument for investigating regressive and progressive assimilation, prosodic/phonotactic constraints, and prelexical perceptual repair strategies in different language background groups and proposes statistical best practices for future phoneme detection research.

This interactive guide intends to accompany Carmen Benito-Vessels’  research  about early modern Spain and the early modern United States (2018, 2022, and 2023). The primary goal of this project is to bring to light 16th-century colonial events that happened in the Eastern United States and shaped the history of both countries. 

Non-readers, who lack alphabetic literacy, may perform differently from alphabetically literate readers on tasks that draw upon phonological awareness, or may fail to perform them at all, despite their lexical and grammatical capabilities. But for alphabetically literate, reading adult learners of a second or subsequent language (L2+) in instructed foreign language (FL) settings, phonological representations typically entail both speech sound categories and orthographic labels, domains connected by grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) on a language-specific basis. A long tradition of auditory phonetic training research demonstrates benefits for aural perception of novel L2+ contrasts, but such training studies focus almost exclusively on gains in L2+ aural perception and articulatory production rather than connection to the orthographic domain. Our study investigates how phonetic training impacts the phonological and orthographic domains, including category perception and target-language (TL) GPCs, across the crucial differences between first language (L1) categories vs. L2+ categories and between naïve pre-learners in cross-language speech perception vs. L2+ learners in L2+ speech perception at early stages of exposure. The paper reports preliminary results on one novel vowel condition (represented by German Ü) and one novel consonant condition (represented by German CH). The L2+ Sound Learning Lab, led by Dr. John H.G. Scott (principal investigator) presented these findings at the 2023 Boston University Conference on Language Development. This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.