Asymmetric mapping from phonetic to lexical representations in second-language listening

Abstract

The mapping of phonetic information to lexical representations in second-language (L2) listening was examined using an eyetracking paradigm. Japanese listeners followed instructions in English to click on pictures in a display. When instructed to click on a picture of a rocket, they experienced interference when a picture of a locker was present, that is, they tended to look at the locker instead. However, when instructed to click on the locker, they were unlikely to look at the rocket. This asymmetry is consistent with a similar asymmetry previously observed in Dutch listeners' mapping of English vowel contrasts to lexical representations. The results suggest that L2 listeners may maintain a distinction between two phonetic categories of the L2 in their lexical representations, even though their phonetic processing is incapable of delivering the perceptual discrimination required for correct mapping to the lexical distinction. At the phonetic processing level, one of the L2 categories is dominant; the present results suggest that dominance is determined by acoustic-phonetic proximity to the nearest L1 category. At the lexical processing level, representations containing this dominant category are more likely than representations containing the nondominant category to be correctly contacted by the phonetic input. r

Novel second-language words and asymmetric lexical access

“…In an effort to understand the direction of the asymmetry, they first noted that the Japanese liquid consonant is phonetically closer to English /l/ than it is to English /r/ (Aoyama et al, 2004). Cutler et al (2006) thus concluded that the L2 category that is phonetically closer to the L1 category emerges as the dominant category for the purpose of auditory word recognition. Does this phonetic closeness argument explain the Weber and Cutler (2004) findings with respect to the dominance of the /e/ category?…”

“…That is, a number of perceptual identification studies (Broersma, 2005;Cutler, Weber, Smits, & Cooper, 2004) show a perceptual bias towards English /e/ when Dutch listeners classify tokens containing the two English vowels. However, this /e/ bias may also have another explanation, which is developed and further tested in Cutler, Weber, and Otake (2006). Cutler et al (2006) set out to answer two questions raised by the Weber and Cutler (2004) study: First, can the asymmetry reflecting contrastive lexical representations be replicated in different listener populations, and second, what explains the lexical 'dominance' of one of the members of the L2 contrast over the other ?…”

“…However, this /e/ bias may also have another explanation, which is developed and further tested in Cutler, Weber, and Otake (2006). Cutler et al (2006) set out to answer two questions raised by the Weber and Cutler (2004) study: First, can the asymmetry reflecting contrastive lexical representations be replicated in different listener populations, and second, what explains the lexical 'dominance' of one of the members of the L2 contrast over the other ? Cutler et al (2006) performed a replication of the Weber and Cutler (2004) study, this time with native Japanese speakers listening to words contrasted by English /r/ and /l/, and found a similar asymmetric pattern of lexical activation, with auditory /r/ words inducing looks to /l/ pictures, but not the reverse, suggesting that /l/ was the dominant category for lexical activation.…”

“…However, Cutler et al (2004, p. 273) show that Dutch listeners classified both English /e/ and /ae/ with the same level of accuracy (i.e., below 60%), which suggests that having a common native category does not necessarily result in more accurate perceptual performance. Cutler et al (2006) proposed a second possible explanation for the direction of the asymmetry, based on the influence of orthographic information, which they then rejected in the case of their Japanese learners of English /l/ and /r/. The authors suggest that the orthographic hypothesis would predict English /r/ as the dominant category because the transliteration of Japanese words containing /N/ into alphabetic orthography (i.e., a writing system called romanji) uses the letter 'r' (as in, e.g., tempura).…”

“…A conclusion that can be made from both the Weber and Cutler (2004) and the Cutler et al (2006) studies is that L2 learners are able to lexically encode a novel contrast that they cannot reliably use in the process of auditory word comprehension. This is in striking contrast with most of the studies reviewed in the first paragraphs of this introduction, namely Curtin et al (1998), Pallier et al (2001) and Hayes-Harb and Masuda (2008), all of which provide evidence that is consistent with homophonous lexical entries for L2.…”