The Relationship between the Perception and Production of L2 and L3 Rhotics in Young Multilinguals: An Exploratory Cross-Linguistic Study

There is a scarcity of research into the relationship between speech perception and production from a multilingual perspective. The present exploratory study investigates longitudinally the acquisition of rhotic sounds in 24 adolescent learners who have the same language repertoires (English, German, Polish), with English being their L2, and German and Polish their L1 or L3. The design involved a forced-choice goodness task (for perception) and a delayed repetition task (for production) administered in both L2 and L3 at two testing times. The overall results show better performance in perception than production of L2/L3 rhotics at both testing points, although the relationship between the two domains was modulated by the L1 background and universal learnability of the target rhotics. A major effect of language proficiency was found, as overall a stronger link between the two modalities was found for the L2 than the L3 of the learner groups. However, detailed analyses demonstrate different types of perception-production link for individual learners over time.