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Category: Project

Description: The present study investigated the role of syllable structure and consonant sonority in speech segmentation in L2 Spanish. Previous studies showed that Spanish monolinguals are sensitive to matching/mismatching syllable structure during lexical segmentation, but English monolinguals do not show sensitivity to syllable structure due to the variability of syllable patterns in English. This study examined whether English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish show sensitivity to matching/mismatching syllable structure during segmentation of L2 Spanish. 81 Eng-lish-speaking L2 learners of Spanish and 72 Spanish-speaking L2 learners of English completed a fragment monitoring task, where they identified syllabic fragments embedded in Spanish words. The task manipulated syllable structure and consonant sonority of target fragments and carrier words. The results showed that consonant sonority modulated sensitivity to syllable structure in both groups of L2 learners. Spanish natives responded faster to matching syllable structure in words that had a fricative or a nasal as the second consonant, and English natives responded faster only with a fricative consonant. Higher L2 Spanish proficiency correlated with faster fragment identification, but sensitivity to matching/mismatching structure did not vary as a function of proficiency. The study highlights the influence of phonetic factors in the development of L2 lexical segmentation routines.