Neurophysiology of non-native sound discrimination: Evidence from German vowels and consonants in successive French–German bilinguals using an MMN oddball paradigm

Jane Wottawa,Martine Adda-Decker,Frédéric Isel

doi:10.1017/s1366728921000468

Abstract

Abstract The present electroencephalographical multi-speaker MMN oddball experiment was designed to study the phonological processing of German native and non-native speech sounds. Precisely, we focused on the perception of German /ɪ-iː/, /ɛ-ɛː/, /a-aː/ and the fricatives [ʃ] and [ç] in German natives (GG) and French learners of German (FG). As expected, our results showed that GG were able to discriminate all the critical vowel contrasts. In contrast, FG, despite their high L2 proficiency level, were only marginally sensitive to vowel length variations. Finally, neither GG nor FG discriminated the opposition between [ʃ] and [ç], as revealed by the absence of MMN response. This latter finding was interpreted in terms of low perceptual salience. Taken together, the present findings lend partial support to the Perceptual Assimilation Model for late bilinguals (PAM-L2) for speech perception of non-native phonological contrasts.

Highlights

Late L2 learners face challenges with respect to speech sound perception, especially for phones that do not exist in the native phonological system
The present study aims to investigate the perception of some German vowel and fricative oppositions in French learners of German that we expect to be difficult for French listeners
Our results clearly show that the vowel duration contrast and the [ʃ]-[ç] contrast are not processed in the same way by none of the two groups: German natives and French learners of German

Summary

Introduction

Late L2 learners face challenges with respect to speech sound perception, especially for phones that do not exist in the native phonological system. Their well-established phonological system might help or hinder the perception of sounds in their second language (Troubetzkoy, 1949; Flege, 1995; Best, 1996; Schertz, Cho, Lotto & Warner 2015). Models of perception and production in second languages enable the prediction of possible difficulties that can be encountered by second language learners These models formalize possible interferences between L1 and L2 speech perception and production. Most models do not consider learner proficiency on a continuum, the same predictions are usually made for learners who are either at a beginner’s or at an advanced level

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