Nonnative perception of allophonic cues to word boundaries: Lou spills versus loose pills for speakers of Polish

Abstract

ABSTRACTWord segmentation in L2 is not as optimal as in L1 because many, though not all, cues to signal word boundaries appear to be largely language-specific. Native English listeners use short-lag versus long-lag VOTs in segmenting pairs such as Lou spills versus loose pills. Polish contrasts negative versus short-lag VOTs, so speakers of Polish are expected to be largely insensitive to this English word-boundary cue. Forty-three lower-proficiency and 26 higher-proficiency Polish learners of English segmented English words from VOT cues. Both accuracy and RT measures were analyzed. The results showed that the general accuracy was 59%, identical to Spanish (Altenberg 2005) and French speakers (Shoemaker 2014) and lower than that for Japanese speakers (Ito & Strange 2009). There was no difference between segmenting aspirated and unaspirated onsets in accuracy or RTs. Higher proficiency did not lead to more successful segmentation, but higher-proficiency listeners were faster in their decisions.