Developmental stages and variability in the acquisition of second language segments and prosody

The perceived impression that a spoken utterance is not native is due to the culmination of a combination of segmental and suprasegmental phonological and phonetic characteristics entrenched in the speakers native language (L1) or it results from different types of interplay between those characteristics of the L1 and the second (or foreign) language (L2). The present paper reports findings of a detailed phonetic analysis of German L2 utterances produced by native speakers of English of different proficiency levels. The results show that the mastery of segments and prosody is not a progression of one and the other but rather that the mastery of individual characteristics of either level follows a structured sequence as predicted under the assumption of language learning as a self-organising dynamic process. The results are best interpreted in adaptation of the framework of the Dynamic Systems Theory (DST).