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When blue is a disyllabic word: Perceptual epenthesis in the mental lexicon of second language learners

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2019

ISABELLE DARCY Open the ORCID record for ISABELLE DARCY [Opens in a new window]  and
TRISHA THOMAS
ISABELLE DARCY*
Affiliation:
Indiana University
TRISHA THOMAS
Affiliation:
Indiana University
*
Address for correspondence: Isabelle Darcy, Dept. of Second Language Studies, Indiana University – Bloomington, Morrison Hall 231, 1165 E. 3rd St., Bloomington, IN 47405, USA[email protected]
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Abstract

Word-initial obstruent-liquid clusters, frequent in English (e.g., blue), are prohibited in Korean. Korean learners of English perceptually repair illicit word-initial consonant sequences with an epenthetic vowel [ʊ]. Thus they might perceive blue as b[ʊ]lue, and, at least initially, also represent it lexically as a disyllabic word. We ask whether the sound sequences permitted in one's L1 influence the way L2 words are represented in the mental lexicon. If they do, we predict that in a lexical decision task, Korean learners will accept nonwords containing epenthetic vowels ([bʊˈluː] for blue) as real English words more often than English listeners. These predictions were confirmed: we observed high error rates on test nonwords ([bʊˈluː]) by the Korean participants only, accompanied by few errors on control nonwords ([bɪˈluː]), suggesting that learners’ lexical representations for familiar L2 words can be activated by nonwords that obey their L1 phonotactic grammar.

Keywords

phonotactic grammarperceptual epenthesisphonolexical encodingbilingual mental lexiconKoreanL2 English
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 22 , Issue 5 , November 2019 , pp. 1141 - 1159
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

Funding for this study was provided by the Hutton Honors College via an undergraduate research grant to TT. The authors wish to thank Brandi Emerick, Eamon Anderson, Dr. Tom Busey and Dr. Natsuko Tsujimura for their support. We are indebted to Daniel Whyatt and Levi King for their help with recording the stimuli, as well as to Senyung Lee, Dr. Sun-Young Shin and Young Hwang for providing the loanword status evaluation of the experimental words. We also thank Abdullah Alotaibi for help with the acoustic measurements, and Michael Frisby and JangDong Seo from the Indiana University Statistical Consulting Center for help with the statistical analysis. We further gratefully acknowledge support through an Overseas Travel Grant from the Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs and a 2016 Provost's Travel Award for Women in Science to ID. This work has further benefitted from excellent discussion and thought-provoking questions by audiences at New Sounds 2016 (Aarhus, Denmark) and at the phonetics and phonology reading group (PhLEGMe) at Indiana University. Finally, we also thank the Second Language Psycholinguistics Lab members, as always, for their feedback on earlier versions of this work.

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