Spoken Word Recognition in Second Language Acquisition

Abstract

In order to decode the message of a speaker, listeners have to recognize individual words in the speaker's utterance.

Emphasising sound and meaning: pitch gestures enhance Mandarin lexical tone acquisition

“…These phonological representations of words are then associated with semantic representations of referents, improving discrimination between word meanings on the basis of lexical tone. This finding is consistent with theories of spoken word recognition (Levelt, 1989;Weber & Broersma, 2013) because it indicates that phonological lexical representations are accessed prior to semantic lexical representations. However, pitch gestures resulted in performance on the learned word tone identification task equivalent to performance resulting from the no gesture condition.…”

“…Additionally, pitch gestures resulted in performance on the novel word tone identification task equivalent to performance resulting from both the se mantic gesture and no gesture conditions. These findings are inconsistent with the theories of L2 spoken word recognition (Weber & Broersma, 2013) and embodied cognition (Barsalou, 2008), both of which maintain that visuospatial illustrations of pitch contours conveyed via gesture should enhance lexical tone identification. Pitch gesture's failure to enhance lexical tone identification relative to no gesture is consistent with previous research showing that gestures depicting vowel length do not enhance its perception relative to no gesture (Hirata & Kelly, 2010).…”

“…The word-meaning association task used in this study tested English speakers' recognition of the meanings of Mandarin words differing only in tone. Given the high phonological demands of this task, we believed that phonological representations of these words would be activated prior to semantic representations, and that tone gestures would facilitate this process, as predicted by theories of spoken word recognition (Levelt, 1989;Weber & Broersma, 2013). Because we did not believe that semantic representations of these words would be acti vated concurrently with phonological representations, as postulated by the theory of embodied cognition (Barsalou, 2008), we predicted that semantic gestures would not similarly enhance word-meaning association.…”

“…Moreover, this theory predicts that meaning-related iconic gestures should facilitate word-meaning association by activating conceptual representations of referents con currently with phonological representations of words, resulting in robust multimodal representations of words and their meanings. On the other hand, theories of spoken word recognition (Levelt, 1989;Weber & Broersma, 2013) predict that pitch gestures, rather than semantic gestures, should facilitate word-meaning association. This prediction arises from models and evidence indicating that phonological representations of words, which include lexical tones in Mandarin, are activated prior to concep tual representations of referents (Poss, Hung, & Will, 2008;Van Donselaar, Koster, & Cutler, 2005;Yip, Leung, & Chen, 1998).…”

Retrieving L2 word stress from orthography: Evidence from word naming and cross-modal priming

“…In the case of master, there are many neighbours that share the stress position with the decoded word, which might facilitate word naming. This conclusion for L2 lexical phonological retrieval in naming is similar to that of L2 spoken word recognition studies (e.g., Cutler & Weber, 2007;Weber & Broersma, 2012). However, if the BP native speakers read the L2 word signal /ˈsɪɡ.nəl/, a cognate with the L1 word sinal /si ˈnaw/, the incongruence in word stress might result not only in less activation of sinal (leading to a smaller cognate facilitation effect), but also in the activation of other word candidates due to word stress differences (e.g., sino -which is a noun meaning 'bell' and an adjective meaning 'Chinese' , pronounced as /ˈsinu/).…”