A Stochastic Optimality-Theoretical Account Of The Acquisition Models Of English Speech Sound Categories In A Classroom SLA Setting

This paper aims at constructing the Stochastic Optimality-Theoretic models of acquisition of the English perceptual and articulatory speech sound categories in a classroom SLA setting. The participants in the present study are Chinese primary school pupils who started to learn English in a classroom environment from Grade-1. The models have been tested by experiments and computer simulations.Research shows that in the course of acquiring the perceptual English L2 speech sound categories that have no counterparts in their L1 Chinese phonetic and phonological inventory, children experience a different procedure: While children acquire the perceptual speech sound categories of their mother language in two discrete stages, (namely, (1) the acoustic-driven learning stage which leads to the creation of phonetic categories, and (2) the lexicon-driven learning stage which leads to the creation of phonological categories,) they acquire the perceptual speech sound categories of English as a foreign language in one step, that is, they must develop the L2 phonetic and phonological categories simultaneously.On the other hand, in the acquisition of articulatory L2 speech sound...