Lexical support for phonetic perception during nonnative spoken word recognition.

Second language comprehension is generally not as efficient and effective as native language comprehension. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that lower-level processes such as lexical support for phonetic perception are a contributing factor to these differences. For native listeners, it has been shown that the perception of ambiguous acoustic–phonetic segments is driven by lexical factors (Samuel Psychological Science, 12, 348-351, 2001). Here, we tested whether nonnative listeners can use lexical context in the same way. Native Hebrew speakers living in Israel were tested with American English stimuli. When subtle acoustic cues in the stimuli worked against the lexical context, these nonnative speakers showed no evidence of lexical guidance of phonetic perception. This result conflicts with the performance of native speakers, who demonstrate lexical effects on phonetic perception even with conflicting acoustic cues. When stimuli without any conflicting cues were used, the native Hebrew subjects produced results similar to those of native English speakers, showing lexical support for phonetic perception in their second language. In contrast, native Arabic speakers, who were less proficient in English than the native Hebrew speakers, showed no ability to use lexical activation to support phonetic perception, even without any conflicting cues. These results reinforce previous demonstrations of lexical support of phonetic perception and demonstrate how proficiency modulates the use of lexical information in driving phonetic perception.