Lexical influences on response times in Japanese listeners’ recognition of spoken English words.
Kiyoko Yoneyama, Benjamin Munson · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2011
One index of phonological knowledge of an L2 is the magnitude of phonological neighborhood density (PND) effects on word recognition. Imai et al. [JASA (2005)] showed that effects of PND on word-recognition accuracy were only present in advanced Spanish-speaking L2 English learners and not in beginning learners. This poster presents a follow up to Imai et al.’s study using Japanese L1 acquiring English as an L2 (JL1-EL2) and Native English listeners (NELs). Previous reports of this work [Yoneyama and Munson, J. Phonetic. Soc. Japan (2010)] failed to replicate Imai et al.’s findings, in that we observed strong effects of frequency and neighborhood density on the performance of three groups of listeners: both beginning and advanced JL1-EL2 speakers, and native English speakers. Here we investigate the influence of lexical factors on reaction times (RTs) in spoken-word recognition in the same listeners. A preliminary analysis of a subset of data comparing the least-proficient JL1-EL2 speakers to the NELs shows larger effects of PND on RTs for the JL1-EL2 listeners than for the NELs. Together, the findings suggest that lexical and phonetic factors influence second-language word recognition in complex, language-specific ways. [Work supported by NSF Grant No. BCS 0729277.]