Phonetic context effects in second-language phonetic category discrimination

Abstract

In an exemplar-based model, effects of linguistic experience in L2 acquisition are explained as the conspiracy of experienced tokens in reshaping phonetic category representations (Goldinger, 1998; Johnson, 1997). Such a model predicts that acquisition of a new category is facilitated in phonetic contexts, which are highly dissimilar to L1 experience. This prediction was tested for English-speaking learners’ acquisition of the prevoicing-short lag bilabial stop contrast in French. In a phoneme-monitoring task, French learners heard French CV words and responded whenever they heard “the sound p.” Word-initially, [p] exemplifies the category /b/ in English but /p/ in French. French vowels included English-like [i u e o] and front rounded non-English [y o]. If learners' stop category representations retain experienced stops in context, stop tokens preceding [y o] fall only in the French pre-voicing [b] to short-lag [p] VOT range, while stops preceding [i u e o] include tokens of both languages’ categories ([...