Evidence for language transfer leading to a perceptual advantage for non-native listeners

Abstract

Phonological transfer from the native language is a common problem for non-native speakers that has repeatedly been shown to result in perceptual deficits vis-a-vis native speakers. It was hypothesized, however, that transfer could help, rather than hurt, if it resulted in a beneficial bias. Due to differences in pronunciation norms between Korean and English, Koreans in the U.S. were predicted to be better than Americans at perceiving unreleased stops-not only in their native language (Korean) but also in their non-native language (English). In three experiments, Koreans were found to be significantly more accurate than Americans at identifying unreleased stops in Korean, at identifying unreleased stops in English, and at discriminating between the presence and absence of an unreleased stop in English. Taken together, these results suggest that cross-linguistic transfer is capable of boosting speech perception by non-natives beyond native levels.

Individual differences in categorical perception of speech: Cue weighting and executive function

“…It has been proposed that learning new cue weighting strategies is a crucial part of second language learning (Holt & Lotto, 2006; Iverson et al, 2003, 2005; Escudero, Bendersa & Lipski, 2009; Flege, Bohn, & Jang, 1997; Schertz et al, 2015; 2016; Silbert et al, 2015) as well as first language acquisition (Nittrouer 1992; 2002; Nittrouer & Miller, 1997; Hazan & Barret, 2000; Li, 2012; Walley & Carrel, 1983). Besides a group-level perceptual advantage or deficit of phonological structure between L1 and L2 (Best, 1995; Best & Tyler, 2007; Flege, 2005; Chang & Mishler, 2012), we suspect that individuals who attend more to secondary cues in order to supplement less informative primary cues in their first language are more attentive to how cue weighting differs in their second language and may be more successful L2 learners.…”

Bilingual perceptual benefits of experience with a heritage language

“…For example, L1 English speakers are worse at perception of unreleased final stops in Thai than both L1 Thai speakers and L1 Korean speakers (Abramson & Tingsabadh, 1999; Tsukada, 2006; Tsukada & Roengpitya, 2008; Tsukada, Nguyen, Roengpitya & Ishihara, 2007). 3 In addition, L1 English speakers are worse than L1 Korean speakers at perception of unreleased final stops in both Korean and English (Chang & Mishler, 2012). The finding that L1 Korean speakers outperform L1 English speakers in perception of English unreleased final stops is especially noteworthy because it suggests that an advantageous perceptual bias from the L1 can compensate for, and even overcome, the decrement in perceptual accuracy characteristic of L2 speech processing.…”

The phonetics of second language learning and bilingualism

“…In closing, although the focus of this chapter has been phonetic development in typical late-onset L2 learners, it is worth drawing the reader's attention to some related areas of research activity that, for reasons of space, have not been given extensive discussion here. First, CLI is being understood in new ways, not just in terms of "negative" or "positive" transfer from the L1 (Lado, 1957;Goto, 1971;Odlin, 1989;Cutler, 2001) but also in terms of native-language transfer benefits for L2 learning (Bohn and Best, 2012;Chang and Mishler, 2012;Chang, 2016).…”