Direct mapping of acoustics to phonology: On the lexical encoding of front rounded vowels in L1 English– L2 French acquisition

Darcy, Isabelle; Dekydtspotter, Laurent; Sprouse, Rex A.; Glover, Justin; Kaden, Christiane; McGuire, Michael; Scott, John H. G.

doi:10.1177/0267658311423455

Cited by 59 publications

(63 citation statements)

References 80 publications

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“…In order to explain this finding, it is plausible to claim that L1 phonological representations might have been activated already in the immediate imitation condition independently from the necessesity of their activation. This claim is supported by studies that show that auditory information may directly co-activate L1 phonological representations [40,41]. Another piece of evidence that supports this claim is also found in my previous work [18], in which reaction times in discrimination tasks were longer for learners than non-learners.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 72%

Does speech production in L2 require access to phonological representations?

Asano¹,

Braun²

2016

Speech Prosody 2016

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Following the theory of direct realism [1, 2, 3], non-native (L2) speakers should be able to imitate a stimulus without requiring the access to L2 phonological representations. In line with theories of working memory [4, 5], however, they should encounter difficulties in imitating a stimulus with L2 phonological structure at the point once phonetic information decayed and therefore phonological representations are required. In order to test the validity of these claims, the current study investigates L2 speakers' ability to immitate L2 segmental length contrasts in an immediate vs. delayed imitation paradigm. In the immediate imitation condition, participants should be able to make use of phonetic information taken from the acoustic echo of the stimuli. In the delayed imitation condition, however, phonological representations were required after the decay of phonetic information. The results show that L2 speakers' performance differed from that of native (L1) speakers in the immediate imitation condition, suggesting that phonological representations had been already activated in the immediate condition. L2 speech production may inevitably require phonological representations. The claim made by the direct realist view was not supported in this study.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 72%

Does speech production in L2 require access to phonological representations?

Asano¹,

Braun²

2016

Speech Prosody 2016

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“…There is a body of literature, however, that has challenged the assumption that phonetic distinctions must precede phonological encoding in the lexicon. These studies have shown that L2 leaners may establish lexical contrasts but still exhibit persistent perceptual errors in the discrimination of phonemic contrasts in categorization tasks (Cutler, Weber, & Otake, 2006; Darcy et al, 2012; Escudero, Hayes-Harb, & Mitterer, 2008; Hayes-Harb & Masuda, 2008; Weber & Cutler, 2004). The fact that advanced L2 learners may acquire knowledge of lexical contrasts despite unreliable performance on discrimination tasks confirms that the establishment of a lexical contrast is independent of the acquisition of phonetic categories.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The perception of language-specific phonetic categories does not guarantee accurate phonological representations in the lexicon of early bilinguals

Amengual

2015

Applied Psycholinguistics

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This study examines the perception and processing of the Catalan /e/-/ɛ/ and /o/-/ɔ/ vowel contrasts by 60 Spanish-Catalan bilinguals in Majorca (Spain). Results from binary forced-choice identification, AX discrimination, and lexical decision tasks show that even though these early and highly proficient bilinguals demonstrate a high accuracy in perceptual identification and discrimination tasks, they have difficulties distinguishing between words and nonwords in a lexical decision task. Spanish dominants also exhibited higher error rates than Catalan dominants in the lexical decision task. These findings provide evidence that making explicit judgments regarding whether a certain sound belongs to a phonemic category (i.e., as accomplished via identification and discrimination tasks) does not entail that listeners have an appropriate representation at the lexical level.

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“…Broersma, 2012;Cutler et al, 2006;Darcy et al, 2012;Weber and Cutler, 2004). Furthermore, L1 homophone effects observed for orthographic stimuli (Ota et al, 2009) suggest that L1 homophone effects can manifest themselves without the direct involvement of phonetic processing, raising two possibilities: (1) L1 homophone effects can occur independently of L2 listeners' abilities to distinguish difficult L2 contrasts, or (2) the effects can occur under an indirect influence of L2 listeners' lack of abilities to discriminate difficult L2 contrasts reliably.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A prerequisite to L1 homophone effects in L2 spoken-word recognition

Nakai

Lindsay

Ota

2014

Second Language Research

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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 2 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...

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Direct mapping of acoustics to phonology: On the lexical encoding of front rounded vowels in L1 English– L2 French acquisition

Cited by 59 publications

References 80 publications

Does speech production in L2 require access to phonological representations?

Does speech production in L2 require access to phonological representations?

The perception of language-specific phonetic categories does not guarantee accurate phonological representations in the lexicon of early bilinguals

A prerequisite to L1 homophone effects in L2 spoken-word recognition

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