Is it time to redefine the boundaries of phonology? A response to Archibald

When examined more closely, some of the second language patterns discussed in Professor John Archibald’s article ‘Waiting in the wings: The place of phonology in the study of multilingual grammars’ rely on subphonemic acoustic cues rather than abstract structure, and therefore provide only precarious scaffolding for the claim that second language (L2) behavior must be understood in terms of phonology as traditionally conceived. I argue that these patterns do nonetheless provide an invaluable probe into ‘how the sounds are connected to meaning in a mental grammar’ once we expand the nature and scope of the phonological grammar to include mapping from the acoustic signal to phonological representations.