When both members of a phonemic contrast in L2 (second language) are perceptually mapped to a single phoneme in one's L1 (first language), L2 words containing a member of that contrast can spuriously activate L2 words in spoken-word recognition. For example, upon hearing cattle, Dutch speakers of English are reported to experience activation of kettle, as L1 Dutch speakers perceptually map the vowel in the two English words to a single vowel phoneme in their L1. In an auditory wordlearning experiment using Greek and Japanese speakers of English, we asked whether such cross-lexical activation in L2 spoken-word recognition necessarily involves inaccurate perception by the L2 listeners, or can also arise from interference from L1 phonology at an abstract level, independent of the listeners' phonetic processing abilities. Results suggest that spurious activation of L2 words containing L2-specific contrasts in spoken-word recognition is contingent on the L2 listeners' inadequate phonetic processing abilities.
Key wordsEnglish, Greek, Japanese, L1 phonology, L2 spoken-word recognition, phonetic processing
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I IntroductionResearch on second language (L2) speech perception has shown that various L2 phonemic contrasts do not pose the same degree of challenge to L2 learners. Since the 1990s, many studies have shown that it is difficult to learn to discriminate L2 phonemes when the contrasting phonemes are perceived by the L2 listeners to be similar to a single phoneme in their first language (L1), while L2 phonemes perceived to be similar to different L1 phonemes are easy to discriminate (hereafter 'difficult' vs. 'easy' L2 contrasts), consistent with Best's Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best, 1991;Best and Tyler, 2007). Difficult L2 contrasts include the English /l/ vs. /r/ in syllable-initial position for L1 Japanese listeners, who would perceptually map both phonemes to the only liquid sound /ɾ/ in Japanese (see Aoyama et al., 2004, and references therein), and the English /ɛ/ vs. /ae/ contrast for L1 Dutch listeners, who would perceptually map both vowels to the Dutch /ɛ/ (Cutler et al., 2005). Easy L2 contrasts include the English /w/ vs. /j/ for L1 Japanese listeners, who would perceptually map each of the English phonemes to /w/ vs. /j/ in their L1 (Best and Strange, 1992).As one would expect, difficult L2 phonemic contrasts have been shown to produce non-native like behaviour in L2 spoken-word recognition. Specifically, minimal-pair words differing by a difficult L2 contrast (e.g. lock and rock for the Japanese; kettle and cattle for the Dutch) appear to be treated as if they were homophonous in L2 spoken-word recognition. In an auditory lexical decision task, the presentation of a member of such a minimal pair can facilitate the recognition of the other member (Broersma, 2002;Pallier et al., 2001; see, however, Broersma, 2012, for the observation of both facilitation and inhibition). Nonwords that differ from real words by a difficult L2 contrast (e.g. geng /gɛŋ/ vs. gang /gaeŋ/ for L1 Dutch listeners) t...