F1 AS A GUTTURAL PLACE CUE; RAPID ACQUISITION AND TRANSFER IN L1 ENGLISH L3 ARABIC

Alwan (1989) found that F1 is the primary cue native Arabic speakers use to discriminate uvular and pharyngeal consonant contrasts. However, F1 is not a primary place cue in English; listeners rely instead on F2 Delattre et al. (1955). The present study extends the experiment conducted by Alwan (1989) to ask whether native English speakers learning Arabic can learn to use F1 and ignore F2, like native speakers, as well as how learner perception differs based on variables of L2 experience. This study replicated findings from Alwan (1989) that native speakers use F1 as a primary cue for guttural consonants and also provided evidence for a perceptual merger of /ʕ/ and /ʔ/ in Palestinian Arabic. L2 perceptual results show that beginner and advanced learners weigh F1 cues more heavily than F2, demonstrating that English speakers can learn to disregard their native F2 place cue and instead repurpose an existing L1 cue, F1. Re-weighting of cues occurs quickly, within the first semester of learning. Furthermore, while previous research found general effects of L2-L3 transfer advantages (Onishi, 2018; Wrembel et al., 2019), this study found that transfer can be language-specific. Participants who had L2 experience with post-velar consonants used more F1 information and patterned more like native speakers than those without previous exposure to post-velars. However, this perceptual advantage is limited to beginner learners. Results are discussed in the context of L2 perception models such as the SLM (Flege, 1995), SLM-r (Flege & Bohn, 2021), PAM-L2 (Best & Tyler, 2007), and L2LP (Escudero, 2005).