Experience with foreign accent influences non‐native (L2) word recognition: The case of th‐substitutions.

Abstract

Effects of mispronunciations on word recognition are often explained in terms of perceptual similarity: the less similar mispronunciations are to target words, the more lexical activation is disturbed. Using th‐mispronunciations that occur in foreign‐accented English, this study investigated whether, irrespective of perceptual similarity, experience with mispronunciations influences word recognition. While Dutch speakers of English frequently substitute voiceless th with /t/ (e.g., /tεft/ for theft), German speakers prefer /s/ (e.g., /sεft/); the perceptually close /f/ occurs infrequently in both groups. Four eye‐tracking experiments examined whether familiar substitutions cause stronger lexical activation than less familiar ones. German and Dutch participants listened to sentences spoken with a German or Dutch accent (e.g., “Now you will hear /tεft/”), while they were looking at a display with four printed words (e.g., theft, left, kiss, mask). The time course of lexical activation was measured as a function of amount of looks to printed th‐words after hearing mispronounced words with a /t/, /s/, or /f/ substitute. Irrespective of the heard accent, th‐words were fixated more often when hearing /t/ for Dutch listeners but /s/ for German listeners, while /f/ never outperformed the accent‐specific dominant substitute. The results suggest an influence of accent‐specific experience on L2 word recognition.