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Arabic and English differ in how they organize stop voicing along the voice onset time (VOT) continuum. Jordanian Arabic typically contrasts prevoiced /b/ with short-lag voiceless stops, whereas General American English uses short-lag /b/ and long-lag aspirated /p/ in stressed singleton onsets, with aspiration suppressed after /s/. Within the revised Speech Learning Model (SLM-r), such learning should appear not only as shifts in mean VOT but also as changes in dispersion, overlap, perceptual boundary location, and context-sensitive control. Sixty-five adults participated: 45 Jordanian Arabic L1 learners of English and 20 General American English controls. Learners completed an institutional English placement test that excluded speaking or pronunciation, and all participants produced real-word English stimuli containing singleton /b/, singleton /p/, and /sp/ cluster /p/. Participants also completed VOT identification and context-naturalness perception probes. VOT was measured from unaltered waveforms in Praat, with strong inter-rater reliability. Learners distinguished /b/ and /p/ in production, but their singleton /p/ VOT remained shorter and more variable than that of controls. Higher proficiency predicted longer singleton /p/ VOT, reduced within-speaker dispersion, reduced /p/-/b/ distributional overlap, lower perceptual /b/-/p/ boundary values, and stronger suppression of aspiration in /sp/ clusters. Learners nevertheless continued to rate overaspirated /sp/ tokens as relatively natural, indicating residual difficulty with context-conditioned aspiration. The findings support a distribution-sensitive account of L2 stop learning: proficiency-related development is reflected in the tightening and separation of VOT distributions and in emerging phonological control, not in mean category placement alone.
Aldamen et al. (Thu,) studied this question.