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Differences in phonetic-to-lexical perceptual mapping of L1 and L2 regional accents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2017

SAIOA LARRAZA  and
CATHERINE T. BEST
SAIOA LARRAZA*
Affiliation:
Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, CNRS UMR 8158
CATHERINE T. BEST
Affiliation:
MARCS Institute, and School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University
*
Address for correspondence: Saioa Larraza, Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, CNRS UMR 8158, Université Paris Descartes, 45, Rue des Saints-Pères, 75006 Paris, France saioa.larraza@parisdescartes.fr
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Abstract

This study investigates how second language (L2) listeners match an unexpected accented form to their stored form of a word. The phonetic-to-lexical mapping for L2 as compared to L1 regional varieties was examined with early and late Italian-L2 speakers who were all L1-Australian English speakers. AXB discrimination and lexical decision tasks were conducted in both languages, using unfamiliar regional accents that minimize (near-merge) consonant contrasts maintained in their own L1-L2 accents. Results reveal that in the L2, early bilinguals’ recognition of accented variants depended on their discrimination capacity. Late bilinguals, for whom the accented variants were not represented in their L2 lexicon, instead mapped standard and accented exemplars to the same lexical representations (i.e., dual mapping: Samuel & Larraza, 2015). By comparison, both groups showed the same broad accommodation to L1 accented variants. Results suggest qualitatively different yet similarly effective phonetic-to-lexical mapping strategies both for L2 versus L1 regional accents.

Keywords

regional accentsL2 versus L1speech perceptionspoken word recognitionperceptual adjustment to accent variation

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Footnotes

*This study was partially funded by BCBL-Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, by MINECO Grant PSI2010-17781 to Arthur Samuel from the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness and by visiting PhD student support from MARCS Institute, University of Western Sydney, Australia, where the study was conducted. We give special thanks to Arthur Samuel, Anne Cutler, Jason Shaw, Bruno di Biase, Donald Derrick and Tonya Agostini for their valuable comments and help with the stimuli, and in general the BCBL and the MARCS Institute for the kindness and cooperation showed during the development of this project.

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