Tracking non-native acquisition of the Spanish tap-trill distinction: Cross-modal priming differences between native and non-native Spanish speakers.

Abstract

English-speaking learners of Spanish often fail to achieve nativelike pronunciation of the tap-trill distinction in words like caro “expensive” and carro “car.” The trill proves difficult because it is neither a phoneme nor an allophone in English. Although the tap exists as an allophone of /t/ and /d/ in American English, learners of Spanish must learn to process it as a phoneme rather than an allophone. Similarly, English learners of Spanish have difficulty acquiring the spirantization of voiced stops, i.e., /d/ spirantizes in codo “elbow,” which occurs in the same environment as flapping. This study uses a cross-modal priming task to investigate whether L2 Spanish learners are able to process intervocalic tap, trill, /d/, and /t/ in the same way as L1 Spanish speakers. Using a cross-modal priming paradigm, eight English-speaking learners of Spanish were compared to eight native Spanish speakers. Results show that auditorily presented words with intervocalic taps resulted in faster response times for words like cada for learners of Spanish, but the same auditory stimuli resulted in faster response times for identically matching targets like cara for native Spanish speakers. These results suggest that cross-modal priming can be used to track L2 acquisition.