Lexical support for phonetic perception during nonnative spoken word recognition

Arthur G. Samuel*, Ram Frost

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

Second language comprehension is generally not as efficient and effective as native language comprehension. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that lower-level processes such as lexical support for phonetic perception are a contributing factor to these differences. For native listeners, it has been shown that the perception of ambiguous acoustic–phonetic segments is driven by lexical factors (Samuel Psychological Science, 12, 348–351, 2001). Here, we tested whether nonnative listeners can use lexical context in the same way. Native Hebrew speakers living in Israel were tested with American English stimuli. When subtle acoustic cues in the stimuli worked against the lexical context, these nonnative speakers showed no evidence of lexical guidance of phonetic perception. This result conflicts with the performance of native speakers, who demonstrate lexical effects on phonetic perception even with conflicting acoustic cues. When stimuli without any conflicting cues were used, the native Hebrew subjects produced results similar to those of native English speakers, showing lexical support for phonetic perception in their second language. In contrast, native Arabic speakers, who were less proficient in English than the native Hebrew speakers, showed no ability to use lexical activation to support phonetic perception, even without any conflicting cues. These results reinforce previous demonstrations of lexical support of phonetic perception and demonstrate how proficiency modulates the use of lexical information in driving phonetic perception.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1746-1752
Number of pages7
JournalPsychonomic Bulletin and Review
Volume22
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Dec 2015

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2015, Psychonomic Society, Inc.

Keywords

  • Nonnative listening
  • Spoken word recognition
  • Top-down lexical support

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Lexical support for phonetic perception during nonnative spoken word recognition'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this