| Description |
In German, underlyingly voiced obstruents are devoiced in final position (e.g., the word ‘wheel' /ʁad/ is pronounced [ʁat]). Adult, native English-speaking learners of German are known to experience difficulty acquiring phonological processes such as German final devoicing. It has been hypothesized that there is a direct causal relationship between exposure to written input and native English speakers' ability to learn the final devoicing pattern in German (Hayes-Harb, Brown & Smith, 2018; Young-Scholten 2002). While some literature has reported that written input may interfere with the acquisition of target-like surface voicing (Hayes-Harb, Brown, & Smith., 2018), more recent work has suggested there is a written input trade-off (Barrios & Hayes-Harb, 2020), by which exposure to written input aids learners to establish target-like underlying representations. The studies to date have employed production tasks to investigate learners' knowledge of German final devoicing. The present study builds on these findings using a listening task to examine how adult, native speakers of English acquire a German-like final devoicing pattern with or without exposure to written forms. Fifty-six participants learned alternating and non-alternating German-like words in both their suffixed and unsuffixed forms via word form-image pairs, in two word learning conditions: Orthography and No Orthography. They were later tested on their knowledge of the words in a word-picture matching task. It was hypothesized that, consistent with previous findings, exposure to orthographic input during word learning would cause adult English-speaking learners to misremember the surface voicing of words containing underlyingly voiced obstruents in their singular forms, but would prove helpful for learning the underlying voicing of words in their plural forms. As expected, participants generally learned the German-like nonwords, as they scored high on criterion test items, regardless of word learning condition. Moreover, and consistent with past findings, exposure to written input was found to interfere with the acquisition of final devoicing. Specifically, the Orthography Group had more difficulty detecting voicing mismatches for underlyingly voiced words in their singular than plural form. Unexpectedly, the tradeoff effect was not robust in the present study. Together, these findings suggest that orthographic input plays a complex role in the acquisition of phonological processes such as German final devoicing. |
