Spoken word recognition in quiet and noise by native and non-native listeners: Effects of age of immersion and vocabulary size.
Year: 2009
Type: conference-abstract
Abstract: In spoken word recognition, high-frequency words with few and less frequently occurring minimal-pair “neighbors” (lexically easy words) are recognized more accurately than low-frequency words with many and more frequently occurring neighbors (lexically hard words). [Bradlow and Pisoni, J. Acoust. Soc. Am.,106, 2074–2085 (1999)] found a larger “easy-hard” word effect for non-native than native speakers of English. The present study extends this work by specifically comparing word recognition by non-native listeners with either earlier (age 10 or earlier) or later (age 14 or later) ages of immersion in an English-speaking environment to that of native English speakers. Listeners heard six lists of 24 words, each composed of 12 lexically easy and 12 lexically hard target words in an open-set word-identification task. Word lists were presented in quiet and in moderate background noise. A substantially larger easy-hard word effect was obtained only for the later learners, but a measure of oral vocabulary size was significantly correlated with performance for the non-native listener groups only. Thus, the increased easy-hard effect for non-native listeners appears to be better explained as an effect of phonetic proficiency and/or the effect of vocabulary size on the structure of lexical neighborhoods than as an effect of language competition.
DOI: 10.1121/1.4784690
Institution: University of South Florida
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2037712417