Early Sociophonetic Accommodation to L1-Accented English Following Repatriation: Longitudinal Evidence from Saudi Arabian English Bilingual Returnees

This longitudinal study investigated whether early changes in second language (L2) speech perception among Saudi bilingual returnees following repatriation reflected phonological attrition or sociophonetic accommodation. Thirty young Saudi Arabic English bilinguals (aged 14 to 19), who had lived and attended school in the United States during childhood, were assessed shortly after returning to Saudi Arabia and again five months later. The study focused on the perception of two English phonemes absent from Arabic, the voiceless bilabial stop /p/ and the voiced labiodental fricative /v/, which are commonly substituted by /b/ and /f/, respectively, in Arabic-accented English. Data collection included a demographic questionnaire, pronunciation screening to confirm accurate production of the target phonemes, an Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT), and a Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT). Perceptual accuracy declined over time for both phonological contrasts, although the reduction was substantially greater for /v/ than for /p/, while pronunciation accuracy, spontaneous oral production, and grammatical judgment remained stable. These findings suggest that the earliest changes following return to an L1-dominant environment are more consistent with sociophonetic accommodation than with phonological attrition. The study highlights the importance of distinguishing changes in the acceptability of accented speech from changes in underlying phonological representations when investigating early L2 attrition. Implications are discussed for theories of bilingual speech perception, language attrition, and future research employing direct phonological discrimination tasks.