24 Feb 2004

Mits Ota, Rob Hartsuiker and Sarah Haywood

We know that L1 phonology influences the perception and production of L2 sounds, but does it also affect the phonological representations of L2 words in our lexicon? Spelling errors such as the one in our talk title (taken from a real CD sold in Japan) suggest that it does. More specifically, the lexical contrast between L2 words appears to be indeterminate when the relevant sound contrast is absent from the L1. The aim of this study was to examine this hypothesis, building on findings from reading research which show that homophones induce lexical categorization errors (e.g., subjects tend to positively identify <PAIR> as "a type of fruit"; Van Order, 1987; Van Orden & Goldinger, 1994). To the extent that identification of visually presented words is mediated in such a task by some level of phonological representation, we predicted that lexical indeterminacy in L2 would give rise to a similar type of error in near-homophones (e.g., native-speakers of Japanese misidentifying <FRY> as "to move through the air").

Twenty native speakers of English, twenty Japanese-speaking learners of English and twenty Spanish-speaking learners of English participated in a lexical categorization task involving real homophones (SON vs. SUN) and near-homophones with a /l/-/r/ contrast (LOCK vs. ROCK), /b/-/v/ contrast (BAN vs. VAN), and /ae/-/^/ contrast (FAN vs. FUN). The English speakers made more errors with homophones than their spelling controls, but did not show any difference in their categorization of near-homophones. The Japanese speakers showed categorization confusion in homophones and all three types of near-homophones. The Spanish speakers, like the English speakers, only showed homophone effects. The results of the English and Japanese group confirm our hypothesis that near-homophones can cause lexical categorization errors when they involve constrasts lacking in the L1. But the results from the Spanish group suggest that the effects may be interrupted by the grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules in the L1.

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