New Methods for Tracking Development of Sociophonetic Competence: Exploring a Preference Task for Spanish /d/ Deletion

Abstract

Abstract Beyond language use, an important component of communicative competence is the ability to attend to sociolinguistic variation in the input, which requires knowledge regarding when to expect a particular form over another variant according to linguistic or extralinguistic factors. This study explores the acquisition of sociophonetic competence, employing a novel contextualized preference task with an aural component to examine second language (L2) learners’ knowledge of variable Spanish /d/ deletion—a sociolinguistic phenomenon constrained by linguistic, social, and contextual factors—regardless of whether learners produce the deleted variant in their speech. Fifty learners completed a background questionnaire, an elicited imitation task, and the contextualized preference task. Learners’ preference for a deleted variant tended to increase as proficiency level increased, as did sensitivity to variables previously shown to constrain native speaker patterns of variation, including speaker gender, surrounding phonetic context, and grammatical category of the lexical item containing /d/. Overall, findings suggest that this contextualized preference task provides an additional tool for accessing evidence of learners’ developing sociophonetic awareness, tapping an important skill as learners build communicative competence.