What does successful L2 vowel acquisition depend on? A conceptual replication

Abstract

It has been suggested that individual variation in vowel compactness of the native language (L1) and the distance between L1 vowels and vowels in the second language (L2) predict successful L2 vowel acquisition. Moreover, general articulatory skills have been proposed to account for variation in vowel compactness. In the present work, we conceptually replicate a previous study to test these hypotheses with a large sample size, a new language pair and a new vowel pair. We find evidence that individual variation in L1 vowel compactness has opposing effects for two different vowels. We do not find evidence that individual variation in L1 compactness is explained by general articulatory skills. We conclude that the results found previously might be specific to sub-groups of L2 learners and/or specific sub-sets of vowel pairs.