Do position and lexical knowledge matter in children’s second language speech perception?

Abstract

This study examines whether child second language (L2) learners’ perception of the voicing contrast in English stops depends on word position and whether lexical knowledge effects can be detected. Thirty-eight 9-year-old Korean-speaking child learners of English with beginning-level proficiency completed an AX discrimination task in English, either with real word pairs (RW; n = 20) or nonsense word pairs (NW; n = 18). Each pair comprised two words with each containing a voiceless stop or a voiced stop. The categories in comparison appeared in word-initial, word-medial, or word-final position. The analysis revealed a significant effect of position in both groups, but in different directions: Whereas the RW group performed best on the word initial contrast, the NW group performed worst on the word initial contrast. This result is in line with the possibility that L2 sounds are mapped onto L1 phonemes in beginning-level child L2 learners. Furthermore, the fact that the RW group showed lower accuracy on the AX task than the NW group provides evidence for lexical knowledge effects on beginning-level child learners’ L2 perception, indicating that immediate lexical retrieval may hinder subsequent activation of phonological representation.