Imitation in a Second Language Relies on Phonological Categories but Does Not Reflect the Productive Usage of Difficult Sound Contrasts
Imitation in a Second Language Relies on Phonological Categories but Does Not Reflect the Productive Usage of Difficult Sound Contrasts
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DOI：
10.1177/0023830918803978
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发表时间：
2019-09-01
影响因子：
1.8
通讯作者：
Reinisch, Eva
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Llompart, Miquel;Reinisch, Eva
本研究考察了二语学习者在预期难度不同的两种非母语对比条件下，模仿与认知能力和产出能力的关系。对德国英语学习者进行了知觉分类、模仿和一项单词阅读任务，测试的是难度较大的英语/e/-/AE/Contrast和容易的、接近母语的/i/-/？/Contrative。正如预期的那样，对比之间的任务内比较显示，在/i/-/？/Than/e/-/AE/的生产过程中，人们对/i/-/？/Than/e/-/AE/的感知更强劲，差异化更好。模仿也遵循这一模式，表明模仿受到二语范畴的语音编码的调制。此外，学习者模仿/e/和/AE/的能力与他们对这种对比的感知有关，这证实了困难的二语语音对比在语音层面上存在着紧密的知觉-产生联系。然而，/e/和/AE/的模拟标记和朗读标记的声学测量之间没有关系。这种分离主要归因于词汇阅读任务中非母语词汇表征不准确的影响。我们的结论是，模仿与二语语音对比的语音表征密切相关，但不需要反映学习者对这种非母语差异的有效使用。
This study investigated the relationship between imitation and both the perception and production abilities of second language (L2) learners for two non-native contrasts differing in their expected degree of difficulty. German learners of English were tested on perceptual categorization, imitation and a word reading task for the difficult English /e/-/AE/ contrast, which tends not to be well encoded in the learners' phonological inventories, and the easy, near-native /i/-/?/ contrast. As expected, within-task comparisons between contrasts revealed more robust perception and better differentiation during production for /i/-/?/ than /e/-/AE/. Imitation also followed this pattern, suggesting that imitation is modulated by the phonological encoding of L2 categories. Moreover, learners' ability to imitate /e/ and /AE/ was related to their perception of that contrast, confirming a tight perception-production link at the phonological level for difficult L2 sound contrasts. However, no relationship was observed between acoustic measures for imitated and read-aloud tokens of /e/ and /AE/. This dissociation is mostly attributed to the influence of inaccurate non-native lexical representations in the word reading task. We conclude that imitation is strongly related to the phonological representation of L2 sound contrasts, but does not need to reflect the learners' productive usage of such non-native distinctions.