Testing the role of L1 influence in phonetic accommodation by Indian English bilinguals

This study examines whether and how early sequential bilingual speakers of Indian English (IE) accommodate General American English (GAE) in the production of the alveolar lateral /l/. To explore first language (L1) influence on second language (L2) accommodation of IE, we compared Hindi–English bilinguals (HEBs), who consistently produce clear [l], with Telugu–English bilinguals (TEBs), who produce clear [l] word-initially but retroflex [É­] word-finally. We hypothesized that HEBs’ laterals in IE, particularly in the word-final position, would differ more from GAE’s dark laterals than TEBs’ laterals, leading to more convergence toward GAE for HEBs. Participants (N = 10) completed a baseline production task and a shadowing task, repeating words spoken by a GAE interlocutor. A 30-ms steady-state interval was annotated for each lateral, with F1 and F2 measured within this interval. At baseline, HEBs’ laterals were, as predicted, more distant from GAE laterals than TEBs’ laterals. For F1, HEBs showed slight convergence toward GAE for word-initial and word-final /l/, whereas TEBs showed even less. For F2, both groups converged, but TEBs showed greater convergence than HEBs for word-final /l/. Taken together, these findings provide evidence of L1 effects but do not fully support the hypothesis that greater phonetic distance leads to more accommodation.