![]() We will see that, overwhelmingly, such studies reveal the positive effect of this variable. In the following section, we review previous empirical research on the role of acoustic variability in L2 phonetic and lexical learning. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Finally, we make two new empirical contributions by comparing the relative ease of acquisition of consonant sequences (in contrast to individual liquids or vowels) and by investigating the acquisition of two Romance languages (as opposed to English). The present research thus differs from much previous research, which has looked at L2 learners at the initial stages of L2 speech learning. Third, we analyze the interaction of variability and proficiency by comparing intermediate versus advanced speakers. 1991 Pisoni and Lively 1995), we focus on within-category variability within a given language as well as between speakers as opposed to between-speaker variation alone. Second, in contrast to some researchers (e.g., Logan et al. First, whereas the majority of previous research has looked at variability’s effects on the perception of phonemic contrasts, here, we seek to determine whether such effects are also observed in the production of subphonemic properties. We seek to contribute further to the study of the role of input variability in L2 speech learning by expanding on previous research in several ways via the analysis of the acquisition of French and Spanish word-medial stop-rhotic (SR) clusters (e.g., French sucré /sy kʁe/ ‘sweet’, degré /də ɡʁe/ ‘degree’ Spanish: sobra /so bɾa/ ‘excess’, sidra /si dɾa/ ‘cider’) by native speakers of English. To account for the unsupported hypotheses, we discuss a number of issues, including the difficulty of measuring variability, the need to determine the extent to which learners’ perception shapes intake, and the challenge of teasing apart the effects of input variability from those of transferred L1 articulatory patterns. An acoustic analysis of the data partially supports the facilitative effect of phonetic variability. A given parameter was deemed to have been acquired when the learners’ production fell within the range of attested native speaker values. Twenty native speakers per language and 39 L1 English-learners of French ( N = 20) and Spanish ( N = 19) of intermediate and advanced proficiency performed a carrier-sentence reading task. Crucially, for both the stops and rhotics, there are differences in within-language variability. Following previous empirical research on the L2 acquisition of phonetics and the lexicon, we tested the hypothesis that phonetic variability facilitates learning by analyzing English-speaking learners’ production of French and Spanish word-medial stop-rhotic clusters, which differ from their English counterparts in terms of stop and rhotic voicing and manner. We examined the consequences of within-category phonetic variability in the input on non-native learners’ production accuracy.
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