A Study Of Backward Effects Of L3 Training On Perception And Production Of L1 And L2 Plosives By Chinese Learners

First Language(L1)is generally considered to be stable in foreign language acquisition(FLA).In fact,language is dynamic,and all of languages have certain degree of plasticity and can be more or less influenced by external language input.When a foreign language affects L1 has always been a controversial topic in academic circles,previous studies on cross language influence have suggested that FL has an impact on L1 only when the FL has reached a certain level.However,some scholars believe that the influence occurs in the early stage of FL learning.The research on this issue can promote the development of the influence of second language(L2)on L1 to a certain extent,and has strong theoretical and practical significance.Phonetic training is an important method to improve learners’phonetic perception in L2.Through controlling variables of phonetic training,the language acquisition process can be simulated.Third language(L3)acquisition is an extension of L2 acquisition.From the perspective of L3 acquisition,this thesis takes Chinese,English and Spanish plosives as target sounds,aiming to explore the effects of L3training on the production and perception of L1/L2.Specifically,the research mainly answers the following two questions:(1)After the third language training,Can the subjects’first and second language plosive perceptions be affected?If yes,to what extent?(2)Can third language training affect first and second language plosive production?If yes,which consonants are more susceptible to phonetic change?This research adopted the experimental paradigm of pre-test-training-post-test.The contents of the pre-test and post-test were exactly the same.There were three experiments altogether,including production experiment and two perception experiments(discrimination experiment and identification experiment)were designed.The experimental phonetic stimuli were vowel-consonant-vowel(VCV)tokens composed of Chinese,English and Spanish plosives and vowel combinations(aba,ibi,udu).The experimental results were as follows:1.Some individual plosives changed in the posttest,however,training does not significantly affect the subjects’perception of L1 and L2 as a whole.It is found that learners’ability to distinguish Chinese plosives/t~h/,/t/,and English plosives/b/,/p/has improved,the ability to distinguish English/d/from similar plosives decreased by comparing the plosive perception for both TG and CG in the pretest and posttest.The improvement of distinguishing ability may be due to the perceptual sensitivity to the phonetic difference which makes them consciously maintain the difference between languages.2.The L3 effect on the L1 and L2 is not significant.By comparing the production of the TG and the CG in the two tests,it was found that duration of VOT of Chinese plosive/t/in the TG was significantly different from that in the CG.In addition,the other plosives in Chinese and English have no significant change.The above results indicate that although L3 training can have a certain impact on the plosive perception and production of L1/L2,it is not significant on the whole.Compared with the newly acquired language,phonetics in the L1/L2 are stable,and difficult to be subjected to the reverse transfer of the L3.Secondly,several individual plosives show significant changes after training,however,it is not certain that they are all the results of L3 influence,and further research is needed.In addition,this thesis also proves the effectiveness of phonetic training for language acquisition.Compared with CG,the TG showed significant improvement L3 plosive identification ability in the post-test.The results show that after training,the subjects had preliminary mastered the L3 plosive characteristics.How to cultivate students’phonetic perception in new language teaching has always been the difficulty and key point in teaching.Therefore,the training paradigm in this thesis can provide a reference for phonetic teaching.