Foreign accent ratings in third language acquisition: The case of L3 French

Abstract

The present paper constitutes a part of a larger-scale project aimed at investigating the sources and directions of cross-linguistic influence in the phonological acquisition of a third language. To this end, foreign accent ratings were performed on a pool of speech samples of L3 French recorded by L1 Polish subjects, proficient in L2 English, with different competence levels in French. The perceptual judgements of L3 French, performed online by expert raters, involved the ratings of accent, intelligibility, acceptability and confidence level as well as the identification of the subjects’ L1. The study revealed interesting patterns of correspondence between different rating parameters, and demonstrated a high level of inter-rater consistency. The findings pointed to the multilingual subjects’ first language as the prevailing source of cross-linguistic influence in the phonological acquisition of an L3, however, the L2 influence was also found to be considerable, judging on the basis of the raters’ identification of the subjects’ L1. The results appear to be consistent with the assumption of a combined crosslinguistic influence (cf. De Angelis, Third or additional language acquisition. Multilingual matters, Clevedon, 2007) thus substantiating the existence of both native and non-native interference in L3 phonology, although its strength is hypothesised to be dependent on the typological relatedness of the respective language combinations.