The influence of lexical factors on word recognition by native English speakers and Japanese speakers acquiring English: An interim report

Abstract

In our earlier work [Yoneyama and Munson, J. Phonet. Soc. Jpn. 14-1 (2010)], we investigated whether neighborhood density and word frequency affect spoken word recognition in English by beginning and advanced Japanese L2 English speakers, and by native English speakers. Our study was modeled after the work of Imai et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. (2005)]. The results indicated that there were strong effects of frequency and neighborhood density on the performance of all three groups of listeners. However, there was no clear evidence for an emerging “neighborhood competition” effect in the Japanese learners of English, contrary to Imai et al. Here we report two additional analyses of these data. The first uses log-linear modeling (i.e., the j-factors in Boothroyd and Nittrouer [J. Acoust. Soc.Am. (1998)]) to examine word recognition in the two groups. The second examines the influence of lexical variables on spoken word recognition response times in L1 and L2 speakers. Preliminary results suggest that the effect of word frequency and neighborhood density on these measures is similar for L1 and L2 speakers of English.