This study traced the perceptual development of 13 multilinguals over the first year of L3 instructed learning. The overall results point to a non-linear development of foreign language phonology, diverse, feature-dependent CLI patterns and differential learnability of phonetic features.
Although a burgeoning body of L3 phonology research examines patterns of cross-linguistic influence in production, little attention has been given to the perceptual correlate of the process over time. The present study thus examined perceptual development of 13 multilinguals (aged 12-13), with L1 Polish, L2 English (five years of instruction) and L3 German (the first year of instruction). The learners performed in their L2 and L3 a forced-choice naturalness task to test for preference of rhotics and final obstruent (de)voicing. Accuracy and reaction time were recorded for analyses at two testing times (after five and ten months into L3 learning). The overall results indicate that CLI in perceptual development is feature-dependent. The perception of rhotics was relatively stable in L2, but the results exhibited reverse patterns in L3. No significant development has been observed for final (de)voicing. Moreover, the findings suggest that the source of CLI differed across the speakers' languages: the accuracy of rhotics perception differed significantly according to stimulus properties, i.e. whether they were L1-, L2- or L3-accented. Participants also needed more time to process the perception tasks in L3 than in L2.
