ISCA Archive ISAPh 2024
ISCA Archive ISAPh 2024

Language transfer and articulatory conflict in advanced L1 Spanish/Catalan learners of English

Joaquín Romero

This study investigates the production of coronal consonants in isolation and in sequences by native speakers of Spanish/Catalan who are advanced learners of English as a foreign language. The conflicting articulatory demands of consonants such as /ð/, /ɹ/ and /ɾ/, coupled with the complex relationship between the phonemic and allophonic levels across the two languages, have been observed to result in an increased degree of negative L1 to L2 transfer. Advanced English major students produced the consonants in a series of sentences, in which they appeared either in isolation or in combination of two consonants, which, in turn, could be contiguous or noncontiguous. Measures of relative intensity and duration were obtained for each consonant and compared across contexts using linear mixed-models analyses. Both quantitative and qualitative results indicate that, while the production of single consonants does not cause significant problems, sequences of two consonants result in a high percentage of mispronunciations. These findings are taken as evidence of the complex relationship between the phonemic/phonetic status of coronal consonants cross-linguistically and the difficulty in achieving conflicting articulatory targets, which resutls in increased L1 to L2 negative transfer.