The influence of L2 experience on the perception of nonnative phonemic contrasts

Abstract

This study investigated early Korean L2/EFL learners’ perception of English fricative sounds in order to find out whether learners’ different L2 experience influenced the way fricatives were perceived. For this purpose, three groups of children with different L2 experience took part in the study: 20 Korean EFL students, 21 bilingual returnees currently enrolled in an English-immersion program and 19 English-dominant bilinguals residing in the U.S. Their mean age was 9. They took a discrimination test with 48 English nonce words containing voiceless fricatives with four places of articulation (labiodental /f/, interdental /θ/, alveolar /s/, alveopalatal /?/) before the front vowel /i/ and back vowels /?/ and /a/ (e.g., identical pairs: findert-findert, farbin-farbin; non-identical pairs: findertthindert, farbin-tharbin). The results showed that perception of fricative sounds was affected by participants’ different English-language experience. This is because EFL students outperformed Returnees or English-dominant bilinguals on discriminating non-identical stimuli but the latter groups were almost native-like in discriminating identical stimuli. The results also revealed that overall participants with more L2 experience surpassed those with less L2 experience in discrimination and that identical stimuli were better perceived than non-identical ones (84.6% vs. 62.4%). Moreover, Returnees and English-dominant bilinguals had much difficulty distinguishing the labiodental /f/ from the interdental /θ/ and also the interdental /θ/ from the alveolar /s/. In contrast, Korean EFL students had trouble in perceiving identical alveopalatal /?/ vs. alveopalatal /?/ pairs (e.g., sholtemsholtem), even though they were better than Returnees and English-dominant bilinguals in discriminating between the labiodental /f/ and the interdental /θ/ and also between the interdental /θ/ and the alveolar /s/. Accordingly, the results are consistent with the hypothesis that perception of nonnative phonemic contrasts is influenced by learners’ L1/L2 experience. Further, there was a back vowel advantage, as some of the target sounds were discriminated better before back vowels than before front vowels. In addition, implications of the results are discussed in terms of L2 speech perception models (Flege 1995, Best 1995, Best and Tyler 2007).