Lexical and metrical cues for English word segmentation by Mandarin second language learners of English

Abstract

This paper investigates the roles of lexical cues and metrical cues in word segmentation by Mandarin L2 learners of English with high and low English proficiency. A cross-modal form priming paradigm is adopted in the experiment. In the experiment, 33 participants (16 advanced learners, 17 beginning learners) heard a five-syllable phrase (e.g., anythingcorri, anything is the and corri is the ′), produced by a native American English speaker. After 100 ms, a three-syllable letter string (e.g., the corridor) was shown on the screen. The participants task was to decide whether a target was a real word. The contexts, primes, and targets have real word and non-word version and have either SW or WS (S: strong; W: weak) stress patterns. The results indicate that: (1) Lexical cues are the main strategy for advanced learners; (2) Beginning learners rely more on metrical cues; (3) When the stress pattern of contexts and primes are identical, it took participants less time to response. The results support previous studies that lexical and metrical are the cues listeners would rely on when doing segmentation. Furthermore, the results suggest that the strategies listeners rely on would change as they become more proficient in English.