Using the visual world paradigm with printed words, this study investigated the flexibility and representational nature of phonological prediction in real-time speech processing. Native speakers of Mandarin Chinese listened to spoken sentences containing highly predictable target words and viewed a visual array with a critical word and a distractor word on the screen. The critical word was manipulated in four ways: a highly predictable target word, a homophone competitor, a tonal competitor, or an unrelated word. Participants showed a preference for fixating on the homophone competitors before hearing the highly predictable target word. The predicted phonological information waned shortly but was re-activated later around the acoustic onset of the target word. Importantly, this homophone bias was observed only when participants were completing a ‘pronunciation judgement’ task, but not when they were completing a ‘word judgement’ task. No effect was found for the tonal competitors. The task modulation effect, combined with the temporal pattern of phonological pre-activation, indicates that phonological prediction can be flexibly generated by top-down mechanisms. The lack of tonal competitor effect suggests that phonological features such as lexical tone are not independently predicted for anticipatory speech processing.

This study compares the role of exemplars in native and non-native listening. Two English identity priming experiments were conducted with native English, Dutch non-native, and Spanish non-native listeners. In Experiment 1, primes and targets were spoken in the same or a different voice. Only the native listeners showed exemplar effects. In Experiment 2, primes and targets had the same or a different degree of vowel reduction. The Dutch, but not the Spanish, listeners were familiar with this reduction pattern from their L1 phonology. In this experiment, exemplar effects only arose for the Spanish listeners. We propose that in these lexical decision experiments the use of exemplars is co-determined by listeners’ available processing resources, which is modulated by the familiarity with the variation type from their L1 phonology. The use of exemplars differs between native and non-native listening, suggesting qualitative differences between native and non-native speech comprehension processes.

People who were mostly exposed to English with an accent in the early home environment are more native-like when performing various English tasks, compared to those who were mostly exposed to their non-English heritage language (Tao & Taft, 2016). The present study extends from the work of Tao and Taft (2016), further exploring the effects of early home language environment on linguistic and cognitive outcomes later in life. Three groups of young adult participants who differed in their early home language environment were examined on speech comprehension and executive function tasks. Results showed that people who were exposed mostly to non-English heritage languages have disadvantages relative to native monolingual speakers in the comprehension of certain types of stimuli, but show advantages in their executive functioning. Those exposed mostly to nonstandard English showed a less robust advantage in executive functions over native speakers, and showed no apparent disadvantage in speech comprehension.

In this study we explore whether world knowledge (WK) processing differs between individuals listening to their native (L1) or their non-native (L2) language. We recorded event-related brain potentials in L1 and L2 speakers of Spanish while they listened to sentences uttered by native speakers of Spanish. Sentences were either congruent or incongruent with participants’ WK. In addition, participants also listened to sentences in which upcoming words could not be anticipated on the basis of WK. WK violations elicited a late negativity of greater magnitude and duration in the L2 than the L1 group. However, sentences in which WK was not helpful regarding word anticipation elicited similar N400 modulations in both groups. These results suggest that WK processing requires a deeper lexical search in L2 comprehension than in L1 comprehension.