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On the effects of task focus and processing level on the perception–production link in second-language speech learning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2023

Miquel Llompart*
Affiliation:
Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany
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Abstract

This study presents a reanalysis of existing data to investigate whether a relationship between perception and production abilities regarding a challenging second-language (L2) phonological contrast is observable (a) when both modalities must rely on accessing stored lexical representations and (b) when there is an asymmetry in task focus between perception and production. In the original studies, German learners of English were tested on their mastery of the English /ɛ/-/æ/ contrast in an auditory lexical decision task with phonological substitutions, a word-reading task, and a segmentally focused imitation task. Results showed that accurate nonword rejection in the lexical decision task was predicted by the Euclidean distance between the two vowels in word reading but not in imitation. These results extend previous findings to lexical perception and production, highlight the influence of task focus on the degree of coupling between the two modalities, and may have important implications for pronunciation training methods.

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Type
Research Report
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Open Practices
Open data
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Table 1. Correlation matrix for individual measures in the three tasks compared in this study

Figure 1

Table 2. Coefficients and results of log-likelihood comparisons for each retained effect in the final best-fitting model. The results of log-likelihood comparisons between the best-fitting model and two separate models additionally containing imitation and the interaction between vowel and word reading, respectively, are also provided

Figure 2

Figure 1. Effect plots depicting the fitted probability of accurate nonword rejection in the lexical decision task as a function of vowel (top left panel), word reading (top right panel), imitation (bottom left panel), and the interaction between word reading and vowel (bottom right panel).