Elicited imitation tasks (EITs)—tasks that involve repetition of sentence-length stimuli—have received increased attention as tools for measuring general L2 proficiency and implicit knowledge of grammatical features (Kostromitina & Plonsky, 2022). The present study diverges from predecessors by exploring the use of an EIT for accounting for sociophonetic knowledge.
Complementing work on the acquisition of Peninsular phonetic/phonological variants (e.g., George, 2014), the present study investigates acquisition of /θ/ by 25 US learners of Spanish studying abroad in a 6-week immersion program in León, Spain. Learners completed an oral monologic role-play task and a 36-item Spanish EIT (Solon et al., 2019) modified to include Peninsular phonetic features, during their first and last weeks abroad. An at-home (AH) group of 15 second-year university Spanish learners completed the same tasks following a similar timeline. The modified EIT included 30 instances of [θ]. Audio-recorded EIT repetitions were assessed in three ways: (1) using Ortega et al.’s (2002) 5-point rubric for an overall proficiency score per learner, (2) for the number of lexical items containing [θ] successfully reproduced (regardless of pronunciation of the phone), and (3) for the number of instances of [θ] reproduced as [θ]. In the oral role-plays, potential contexts for /θ/ were identified (n = 1,230) and coded for realization. Mixed-effects regressions were used to examine change in EIT scores and [θ] usage over time.
Preliminary results suggest that learners studying abroad in Spain demonstrated increased ability to process [θ], as indicated by higher rates of repetition of lexical items containing [θ] at the end of the program than the beginning. Similar gains were not observed for AH learners, suggesting that improvement was not only the result of repeating the task. Nonetheless, rates of [θ] production were low even at Time 2. Learners’ increased ability to comprehend and repeat EIT content containing [θ] despite no concomitant increase in production suggests that learners gained sociophonetic knowledge during this short sojourn and that this knowledge gain likely would not have been captured by analyzing production alone. Findings support the utility of EITs as a tool for tracking acquisition of sociolinguistically variable phonetic/phonological features
