Lexical and statistical evidence in the acquisition of second language phonemes
Adults can often improve their perception of novel phoneme contrasts with exposure to a second language, but there is yet little understanding of how they accomplish this. The primary aim of this study was to compare two types of evidence that learners might use to learn the phonemes of second language: minimal pairs, or the lexicon, and statistical information. It was found that adults show evidence of perceptual learning based on statistical information alone, but that the availability of minimal pairs leads to more accurate perception of a novel contrast. In a follow-up experiment, it was found that adults can exhibit knowledge of a novel contrast without yet being able to use the contrast to distinguish words in a lexical task.