2008/10/08

Escudero, P., Hayes-Harb, R., & Mitterer, Holger. (2008). Novel second-language words and asymmetric lexical access. Journal of Phonetics, 36, 345–360.

Presentation: Sally

Summary: Shelly

This study aims to examine asymmetry word recognition in L2 learning. Previous studies have found that when listening to a pair of similar sounds in L2, L2 learners tend to treat them as homophones and favor the sound that also exists in their L1. Such asymmetric recognition suggests that listeners do have lexical contrasts of the two sounds in their mental space, because if they have no such contrasts, they should show symmetrical confusion between the two sounds. The present study aims to examine the effect of training with overt visual lexical cues, and see if such information will help L2 learners perform better in forming lexical contrasts than those trained with audio cues only. Fifty Dutch-English listeners were tested in this experiment, and the tested sounds are [ɛ] and [æ]. Previous study has reported that since [ɛ] is an existing sound in Dutch, subjects would tend to asymmetrically recognize [æ] as [ɛ]. In the present study, subjects were divided into two groups, and they were trained to match English novel words with corresponding pictures. The first group was trained with audio-only input (a man reading the word), while the second group was trained with both audio and visual (spelled forms on the screen) input. After training, the two groups were asked to identify the picture when hearing the stimuli, and meanwhile they were being eye-tracked. Results showed that subjects who were trained with both audio and visual input were attracted to and fixated more on [ɛ], and those trained with audio-only showed symmetrical confusion on both [ɛ] and [æ] when hearing [ɛ] and [æ]. Such results suggested that lexical contrasts trained using audio-only will not be as sharp as those trained with both audio and visual inputs. The results also suggested that the link between phonological and orthographical representations is tight.