An acoustic and ultrasound study of the English lateral allophony in first language French and German speakers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous research suggests that second language (L2) speakers of English whose first languages (L1s) are Spanish or French can produce the English /l/ allophony, using clear [l] in onset position and dark [ɫ] in coda position (Colantoni et al., 2023). However, many L1 backgrounds remain unexplored in this context, and few studies have employed ultrasound imaging. This study uses acoustic and ultrasound analyses to investigate the production of English /l/ and the corresponding sound in the L1 by three L1 French speakers and three L1 German speakers, since both languages lack [ɫ], alongside three L1 English speakers. Acoustic and articulatory results showed that L2 speakers produced [ɫ] in English codas, indicated by significantly lower F2 and F2–F1 values, lower tongue bodies, and retracted tongue dorsums. One French and one German speaker produced English /l/ nearly identically to their L1 /l/, indicating assimilation to their L1 category. All other speakers maintained distinct lateral categories for English and their L1. Overall, English /l/ was darker than French and German /l/. These findings confirm that L2 English speakers can acquire the positional allophony despite lacking a dark /l/ in their L1 and highlight variation in how individual L2 speakers produce non-native sounds.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".