Increased lexical activation and reduced competition in second-language listening

Abstract

This study investigates how inaccurate phoneme processing affects recognition of partially onset-overlapping pairs like DAFFOdil-DEFIcit and of minimal pairs like flash-flesh in second-language listening. Two cross-modal priming experiments examined differences between native (L1) and second-language (L2) listeners at two stages of lexical processing: first, the activation of intended and mismatching lexical representations and second, the competition between those lexical representations. Experiment 1 shows that truncated primes like daffo- and defi- activated lexical representations of mismatching words (either deficit or daffodil) more for L2 listeners than for L1 listeners. Experiment 2 shows that for minimal pairs, matching primes (prime: flash, target: FLASH) facilitated recognition of visual targets for L1 and L2 listeners alike, whereas mismatching primes (flesh, FLASH) inhibited recognition consistently for L1 listeners but only in a minority of cases for L2 listeners; in most cases, for them, primes facilitated recognition of both words equally strongly. Thus, L1 and L2 listeners' results differed both at the stages of lexical activation and competition. First, perceptually difficult phonemes activated mismatching words more for L2 listeners than for L1 listeners, and second, lexical competition led to efficient inhibition of mismatching competitors for L1 listeners but in most cases not for L2 listeners.

Keywords:

• Word recognition
• Activation
• Competition
• Second language

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Antje Meyer of the Behavioural Brain Sciences Centre, University of Birmingham (who is now at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics), and Alan Garnham of the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex, for the opportunity to test participants in their labs. Many thanks also go to Anne Cutler, James McQueen, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on previous versions of this paper.

Notes

¹Neither in the analysis of the proportion of correct responses nor in the RT analysis was there an interaction with or main effect of vowel (/æ/ versus /ϵ/).

²Neither in the RT analysis nor in the analysis of the proportion of correct responses was there an interaction involving vowel versus consonant items. When vowel items and consonant items were analyzed separately, there were no interactions with or main effects of vowel (/æ/ versus /ϵ/) or final consonant voicing.

³For the filler words, for the Dutch listeners, both the facilitation in the Match condition and the inhibition in the Mismatch condition were statistically significant in the by subjects analysis [Match versus Control: F1(1, 71 )=34.8, p<.001, partial η ²=.33; Mismatch versus Control: F1(1, 71)=30.5, p<.001, partial η ²=.30], but not in the by items analysis. Note that as filler words each occurred in only one condition (in contrast with the experimental items, for which condition was varied within items), the statistical power of the by items analysis was relatively low.

The Dutch and English listeners' results for the filler words did not significantly differ; there were no interactions between native language and condition [interaction with native language for Match versus Control: F1(1, 142)<1; F2(1, 154)<1; interaction with native language for Mismatch versus Control: F1(1, 142)=2.1, p>.1; F2(1, 178)=1.1, p>.2].