Rounded vowels in English learners of German

1. What is the research question?

The research objective is to add to recent findings of language studies that conclude non-uniformity in individual learners’ developmental paths in L2 vowel perception. And in order to do so, there are two research questions:

(1) Do individual English learners of German exhibit different learning paths in their perceptual development of six rounded German vowels?

(2) Can the observed patterns be explained on the basis of Escudero’s (2005) Second-Language Linguistic Perception (L2LP) model?

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2. What previous studies or general problems motivate the article?

There have been a lot of research to explain the language acquisition differences across individual learners. The singular commonality among all these studies is that they demonstrate how dependent linguistic variables connect with independent non-linguistic variables. However, the authors of this article feel that individual variations can also be explained by exploring their distinct learning paths. This is the motivation behind this article.

They feel that learning paths may not be uniform. But there is really no existing study or theory that explains this explicitly. That is the driver for this article and study.

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3. What do the authors predict they will find, that is, what are their hypothesized results?

The authors predict individual variations in L2 language perception due to learners’ distinct learning paths. They aim to arrive at this result by tracking individual L1 English  learners’ perception of L2 German vowels, based on the L2LP model proposed by Escudero (2005).

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4. What is the methodology? That is, what listeners, sounds, and task/-s do they use?

Two experiments are conducted by the authors: (1) Experiment 1 probes how the learners categorize German vowels with respect to English categories in a cross-language perceptual assimilation task and (2) Experiment 2 examines the ability of the learners to identify L2 German vowels in a forced-choice identification task.

The methodology used in conducting these two experiments involves some listeners, computers and auditory stimuli. In the second experiment, an additional control group (female speakers) was used to make the study comprehensive.

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5. How did the authors administer the task/-s?

In Experiment 1, the authors asked the listeners to classify auditory tokens of the German and English vowels with respect to 13 English response categories that were orthographically presented. The authors also asked the listeners to concentrate only on the first syllable of each word, to safeguard a single phonetic context. On the computer, the second syllable of these words was shown in brackets. Each of the listeners sat in front of computers and received auditory input tokens through headphones. They were allowed to work in their own speed and listen to auditory inputs as much as they wanted in order to categorize the German and English vowels.

In Experiment 2, the listener groups worked with a computer program which showed a list of 14 target words, orthographically presented. The authors presented 140 auditory inputs to the listeners. The learners’ job was to identify which of the 14 possible words they heard. To lessen misidentification, the target words were first presented along with the high-frequency German words that the listeners claimed to be familiar with. They were allowed to work in their own speed and take breaks to prevent stress.

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6. What did they find?

Experiment 1 findings were: (1) cross-language patterns involving the six rounded L2 German vowels are overtly complex in nature, (2) the learners demonstrate different ways of assimilating L2 vowels into English categories and (3) the learning variations observed are not random, but these follow quite a systematic pattern.

Experiment 2 findings were: The control group identified the vowels more accurately than the listeners in the learner groups. Both the learner groups failed to achieve native linguistic proficiency in L2 vowel perception. The authors also observed that additional exposure to German did not substantially impact the learners’ learning performance in the experiment.

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7. How did the findings answer their research question?

The findings reveal that there is truly a great degree of language acquisition difference across individual learners. It is also found that the variations observed are systematic. Thus, these findings answer their research questions well — individual learning variations exist for L2 learners and they vary systematically from each other in the way they perceive L2 sounds to native categories, following the L2LP model.

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8. Do they mention any limitations/problems with the study?

Yes, the authors were objective enough to mention the limitations of their study. They state that the approach adopted for the purposes of their study mean that the conventional quantitative statistical approaches were inadequate and inappropriate. By that, this study has its challenges as it relies, to a certain extent, on the judgment of the researchers/authors.

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9. Do they give a conclusion?

Yes, the authors of this study do provide a conclusion at the end of the discussion on their research findings. They note that the explanations they provided to their research are founded on the L2LP model’s finding that L2 learners make use of definite language perception modes. Although various empirical works re-establish this finding, future studies and explorations are required to assess exactly how, when and to what degree languages become active in L2 perceptual development. And while doing so, it also requires to be determined what methodological areas should be controlled.

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10. Is the abstract a good summary of the article? If not, how would you improve it?

The abstract is fairly a good summary of the article. However, it does not touch upon the aspect of limitation of the study. It does not mention that this article is based, to a large extent, on the judgment of the researchers. The abstract, I feel, would have been more all-rounded and comprehensive if it could briefly include the limitations as well.