Second language influence on perception of first language phonotactics.

Abstract

The results of a speech perception experiment are reported, examining the responses of speakers of the same L1 (Spanish) with varying experience in the L2 (English). Three groups of speakers participated in a wordlikeness rating task in Spanish, in which nonce words were presented in sets that varied as to whether the final consonant of the word was phonotactically legal or illegal: (1) bilinguals who learned both English and Spanish before the age of 5, (2) L1 Spanish speakers that learned English after the age of 12, (3) monolingual speakers without communicative exposure to a second language. All groups differed significantly in the strength of their overall ratings, even though all speakers were technically native speakers of Spanish. In addition, for both the bilingual and second language speakers, ratings for legal vs illegal codas were significantly different. For monolingual speakers, on the other hand, ratings for legal and illegal codas were similar, but response times for these two conditions were significantly different. These results support the idea that native speaker judgements are affected by the extent of language experience that a speaker possesses, and the processing of phonotactic legality may not proceed similarly for monolingual, second language, and bilingual speakers.