Competition dynamics of second-language listening.
Spoken-word recognition in a nonnative language is particularly difficult where it depends on discrimination between confusable phonemes. Four experiments here examine whether this difficulty is in part due to phantom competition from "near-words" in speech. Dutch listeners confuse English /æ/ and /ε/, which could lead to the sequence daf being interpreted as deaf, or lemp being interpreted as lamp. In auditory lexical decision, Dutch listeners indeed accepted such near-words as real English words more often than English listeners did. In cross-modal priming, near-words extracted from word or phrase contexts (daf from DAFfodil, lemp from eviL EMPire) induced activation of corresponding real words (deaf; lamp) for Dutch, but again not for English, listeners. Finally, by the end of untruncated carrier words containing embedded words or near-words (definite; daffodil) no activation of the real embedded forms (deaf in definite) remained for English or Dutch listeners, but activation of embedded near-words (deaf in daffodil) did still remain, for Dutch listeners only. Misinterpretation of the initial vowel here favoured the phantom competitor and disfavoured the carrier (lexically represented as containing a different vowel). Thus, near-words compete for recognition and continue competing for longer than actually embedded words; nonnative listening indeed involves phantom competition.
Broersma
Mirjam
M
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. mirjam@mirjambroersma.nl
Cutler
Anne
A
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D003163:Competitive Behavior; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008960:Models, Psychological; D019303:Multilingualism; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014825:Vocabulary