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Quantifying contextual effects in second language processing of phonolexically ambiguous and unambiguous words

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 January 2017

ANNA CHRABASZCZ  and
KIRA GOR
ANNA CHRABASZCZ*
Affiliation:
National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow
KIRA GOR
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Anna Chrabaszcz, National Research University Higher School of Economics, 21/4 Staraya Basmannaya, Moscow 105066, Russian Federation. E-mail: anna.lukyanchenko@gmail.com
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Abstract

Second language (L2) speakers often experience difficulty discriminating speech sounds of the nonnative language, which can result in phonolexical ambiguity. We report two experiments that examine how L2 Russian speakers may utilize contextual constraints for phonolexical ambiguity resolution during speech comprehension. L2 ambiguous words constitute minimal pairs with palatalized and unpalatalized consonants in the Russian language, where the phonological feature of palatalization marks semantic, morphological, or syntactic distinctions between words. L2 performance is compared to that of a control group of Russian native speakers. The results demonstrate that L2 listeners rely on contextual information for meaning disambiguation during sentence comprehension, but that the relative reliance on different types of context is task specific.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 38 , Issue 4 , July 2017 , pp. 909 - 942
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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