The Effect of Diacritic-Enhancement on L2 Pronunciation of Shared L1/L2 Graphemes

Within the field of linguistics, whether considering language contact situations (Weinreich, 1979) or foreign language education (Lado, 1957), the topic of language transfer, especially as it relates to pronunciation, has always been an item of particular interest. While research on such transfer has mostly focused on various phenomena of the L1 and L2 phonological systems (Flege, 1987; Flege & Bohn, 2021), in the past number of decades a number of studies have highlighted the effects caused by a shared orthographic system, whenever language pairs share such a system (Vokic, 2011; Young-Scholten and Langer, 2015). Such effects have been found to be persistent, not disappearing even after years of residence in the L2-speaking environment, even though the pronunciation issue itself is not problematic for the learner at all. Because this effect is embedded in the orthography itself, the present study sought to explore the possible benefits of manipulating the visual information provided to L2 learners in their orthographic input in order to assist them in their acquisition of a more native-like L2 pronunciation. Looking at a small, homogenous group (n = 25) of university-level, English-speaking learners of L2 Spanish, an experiment was designed focusing on the pronunciation of Spanish intervocalic <d> as [ð], which should not be a problematic sound for these learners phonologically speaking. Participants were divided between three groups in order to test for changes in pronunciation behavior over a 6-week period, either: by normal classroom experience alone, by the help of a brief pronunciation lesson on the target sound, or by combining a pronunciation lesson with the use of a diacritic-enhanced <d> both in the lesson as well as in subsequent paragraph-reading tasks. It was discovered that a brief pronunciation lesson alone was unable to make lasting differences in students' pronunciation as measured by a paragraph-reading posttest, but the group who interacted with diacritic-enhanced text showed substantial improvement in pronunciation of the item. These improvements were found to still be intact in a paragraph-reading task after the diacritics were removed, suggesting that learners had associated the target-like [ð] pronunciation with the authentic <d> itself. Because the results of the present study were obtained using a relatively small sample size, some caution should be exercised in the interpretation of these results, and further study of this particular effect must be carried out in order to corroborate what was found here. Nonetheless, the results of this study indicate the potential for real benefits to incorporating diacritic-enhancement in L1/L2 learning situations where the two languages share an orthographic system but have diverging phonetic realizations of graphemes. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]