RECONSIDERING THE RELIANCE ON FUNCTIONAL LOAD: THE ROLE OF PHONETIC DISTANCE IN PREDICTING L2 SEGMENTAL SUBSTITUTIONS
RECONSIDERING THE RELIANCE ON FUNCTIONAL LOAD: THE ROLE OF PHONETIC DISTANCE IN PREDICTING L2 SEGMENTAL SUBSTITUTIONS

Summary/Abstract: Much research agrees that Functional Load (FL), i.e., the extent to which a phoneme pairdistinguishes between different words in a language, is a useful feature to consider in prioritizingphoneme pairs for pronunciation instruction in the second language (L2) classroom. However,FL measures are not always easy to access and are often calculated according to differentprinciples, whereas other more easily observable features exist, including Phonetic Distance (PD),or the degree of physiological similarity between phones in a phoneme pair. One way to evaluatefeatures and their interrelatedness is to use them in a linear mixed effects regression (LMER)model to predict the rate of observed L2 substitutions that are actually made in speech. This studyexamines the relationship between two measures of FL (Brown, 1988; Gilner & Morales, 2010)and an estimate of PD we devised from 22 unique articulatory features of vowels and consonantsin their ability to predict substitutions in the L2-ARCTIC dataset (Zhao et al. 2018) whileaccounting for other sources of variation. It was found that even when PD had a resolution of only2 points, it was highly associated with variance in substitution rates, but that the best modelincluded FL and PD measures together. This finding suggests that PD may also be an importantconsideration when deciding which phoneme pairs to prioritize in L2 instruction.

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