Submitted by wjarek on 14 January, 2016 - 01:09.
The Department of Contemporary English Language (DoCELu) is happy to announce a Phon&Phon meeting:
Katarzyna Olejniczak (AMU Poznań)
First-language phonotactics in second-language continuous speech segmentation
Tuesday, 19 Jan 2016, 18:30, Room 109A
Abstract
There is ample evidence that listeners are sensitive to phonotactics and use phonotactic cues to identify word boundaries. However, phonotactics is language-specific. It means that phoneme sequences which are phonotactically legal in one language are not necessarily legal in another.
The present study concerns the segmentation problem of a non-native language. It addresses the question of whether native phonotactics influences the lexical segmentation of a non-native language. In the study, advanced Polish users of English as a second language listen to nonsense sequences and detect the embedded English words. According to the phonotactics of Polish and English, a syllable boundary in a sequence could be marked in one of three possible ways: a) one in which both Polish and English require a syllable boundary at the onset of the word, b) one in which English but not Polish requires a syllable boundary at the onset of the word and c) one in which neither Polish nor English requires a syllable boundary at the onset of the word. The study replicates the experiment carried out by Weber (2000), but it is based on a different pair of languages, instead of German and English, Polish and English are used.
The results of the experiment fully confirmed four out of six predictions, whereas two predictions were confirmed partially. This points out that listeners are sensitive to phonotactic cues and use phonotactic information for segmentation. The results show that both native and non-native phonotactic boundary cues influence the segmentation of non-native language. However, despite the fact that advanced L2 listeners can acquire and use the non-native phonotactics, they cannot prevent interference from their native language, which is quite strong.
Submitted by J Weckwerth
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