Assessing L1 Mandarin and L2 English influence on the L3 production of French obstruent coda voicing

Previous research on crosslinguistic influence in third language (L3) phonetic and phonological production has found that both the first language (L1) and the second language (L2) are possible sources of influence. Such research, however, has mainly examined language triads involving European languages and structures (e.g. vowels, VOT) shared by all three languages. In the present study, we seek to expand the empirical basis for assessing the relative contribution of learners’ L1 and L2 via a study of L1-Mandarin–L2-English–L3-French learners’ production of obstruent coda voicing, a feature and structure lacking in their L1. Two hypotheses are tested: that greater influence will come from the learners’ L2 English, and that such influence will be most common among learners of high L2, low L3 oral proficiency as measured by an accentedness task. Participants completed a carrier sentence reading task involving nonce words. We analysed two phonetic parameters: vowel–consonant (VC) duration ratio and percentage (%) obstruent voicing. Considerable support was found for primarily L2-based influence. However, the data did not support any effect of L2 or L3 proficiency. This study is one of the first to examine the production of multiple phonetic parameters for a single phonological contrast. Our results provide new evidence for L2 facilitative transfer, especially when the L1 has a different syllable structure from the L2 or L3. They also reveal that L2-based transfer may affect some phonetic cues but not others. In the present instance, in a subset of speakers we found evidence of transfer affecting only one of the two phonetic cues (the VC duration ratio or % obstruent voicing). These findings further illuminate the complex nature of L3 acquisition.