Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Native versus non-native spoken-word recognition <s> Seeking a processing explanation for the phonological merits of early age exposure to second language use, this study investigates the relationship between age of arrival in the L2 environment and a preference for prosodic versus syntactic cues to sentence interpretation in English. The learners were Cantonese-speaking ESL students at Canadian schools: 13 students in Grade 2,27 students in Grades 7/8, and 16 in Grades 11/12. All had been in Canada for between 1 and 4 years. The students were asked to interpret ambiguous sentences with conflicting prosodic and syntactic cues to structure. In contrast to the pattern found for native English-speaking students at the same grade levels, and contrary to predictions, the older ESL learners were found to be just as likely as the younger ones to attend to prosody rather than syntax. <s> BIB001 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Native versus non-native spoken-word recognition <s> Bilingualism provides a unique opportunity for exploring hypotheses about how the human brain encodes language. For example, the “input switch” theory states that bilinguals can deactivate one language module while using the other. A new measure of spoken language comprehension, headband-mounted eyetracking, allows a firm test of this theory. When given spoken instructions to pick up an object, in a monolingual session, late bilinguals looked briefly at a distractor object whose name in the irrelevant language was initially phonetically similar to the spoken word more often than they looked at a control distractor object. This result indicates some overlap between the two languages in bilinguals, and provides support for parallel, interactive accounts of spoken word recognition in general. <s> BIB002 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Native versus non-native spoken-word recognition <s> Four cross-modal priming experiments and two forced-choice identification experiments investigated the use of suprasegmental cues to stress in the recognition of spoken English words, by native (English-speaking) and nonnative (D utch) listeners. Previous results had indicated that suprasegmental information was exploited in lexical access by D utch but not by English listeners. For both listener groups, recognition of visually presented target words was faster, in comparison to a control condition, after stress-matching spoken primes, either monosyllabic ( mus- from MUsic / muSEum ) or bisyllabic (admi- from ADmiral / admiRAtion ). For native listeners, the effect of stress-mismatching bisyllabic primes was not different from that of control p rimes, bu t mismatching mon osyllabic p rimes produ ced p artia l facilitation . For non -nat ive listeners, both bisyllabic and monosyllabic stress-mismatching primes produced partial facilitatio n. N ative En glish listeners thu s can explo it sup rasegmenta l in for mation in sp oken -wo rd recognition, but information from two syllables is used more effectively than information from one syllable. Dutch listeners are less proficient at using suprasegmental information in English than in their native language, but, as in their native language, use mono- and bisyllabic information to an equal extent. In forced-choice identification, D utch listeners outperformed native listeners at correctly assigning a monosyllabic fragment (e.g., mus-) to one of two words differing in stress. <s> BIB003 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Native versus non-native spoken-word recognition <s> Listeners efficiently exploit sentence prosody to direct attention to words bearing sentence accent. This effect has been explained as a search for focus, furthering rapid apprehension of semantic structure. A first experiment supported this explanation: English listeners detected phoneme targets in sentences more rapidly when the target-bearing words were in accented position or in focussed position, but the two effects interacted, consistent with the claim that the effects serve a common cause. In a second experiment a similar asymmetry was observed with Dutch listeners and Dutch sentences. In a third and a fourth experiment, proficient Dutch users of English heard English sentences; here, however, the two effects did not interact. The results suggest that less efficient mapping of prosody to semantics may be one way in which nonnative listening fails to equal native listening. <s> BIB004 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Native versus non-native spoken-word recognition <s> Abstract The mapping of phonetic information to lexical representations in second-language (L2) listening was examined using an eyetracking paradigm. Japanese listeners followed instructions in English to click on pictures in a display. When instructed to click on a picture of a rocket, they experienced interference when a picture of a locker was present, that is, they tended to look at the locker instead. However, when instructed to click on the locker, they were unlikely to look at the rocket. This asymmetry is consistent with a similar asymmetry previously observed in Dutch listeners’ mapping of English vowel contrasts to lexical representations. The results suggest that L2 listeners may maintain a distinction between two phonetic categories of the L2 in their lexical representations, even though their phonetic processing is incapable of delivering the perceptual discrimination required for correct mapping to the lexical distinction. At the phonetic processing level, one of the L2 categories is dominant; the present results suggest that dominance is determined by acoustic–phonetic proximity to the nearest L1 category. At the lexical processing level, representations containing this dominant category are more likely than representations containing the non-dominant category to be correctly contacted by the phonetic input. <s> BIB005 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Native versus non-native spoken-word recognition <s> This article addresses the question of how second language (L2) learners understand idiomatic expressions in their second/foreign language and advances the proposition that literal meanings of idiom constituents enjoy processing priority over their figurative interpretations. This suggestion forms the core of the literal-salience resonant model of L2 idiom comprehension, whose major assumptions are outlined in the article. On the literal salience view, understanding L2 idioms entails an obligatory computation of the literal meanings of idiom constituent words, even if these idioms are embedded in a figurative context and if their idiomatic interpretation is well-known to L2 learners. The literal salience assumption was put to the test in a cross-modal lexical priming experiment with advanced Polish learners of English. The experiment showed more priming for visual targets related to literal meanings of idiom constituent words than for targets related figuratively to the metaphoric interpretation of the id... <s> BIB006 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Native versus non-native spoken-word recognition <s> The objectives of this study are (a) to determine if native speakers of Canadian French at different English proficiencies can use primary stress for recognizing English words and (b) to specify how the second language (L2) learners' (surface-level) knowledge of L2 stress placement influences their use of primary stress in L2 word recognition. Two experiments were conducted: a cross-modal word-identification task investigating (a) and a vocabulary production task investigating (b). The results show that several L2 learners can use primary stress for recognizing English words, but only the L2 learners with targetlike knowledge of stress placement can do so. The results also indicate that knowing where primary stress falls in English words is not sufficient for L2 learners to be able to use stress for L2 lexical access. This suggests that the problem that L2 word stress poses for many native speakers of (Canadian) French is at the level of lexical processing. <s> BIB007
Given the parallelism of the listener's task in recognising speech in a second or a first language, certain skills already in place for listening to the native language will be available when second-language speech is heard. The architecture of the spoken-word recognition system is in principle not language-dependent; multiple activation of word candidates and competition between them will work whatever the vocabulary. Nonetheless, this ready availability does not necessarily work in the non-native listener's favour. First, consider the crucial role of phonemic distinctions in modulating the availability of candidate words, and especially in getting rid of potential candidates as soon as a mismatch between input and stored representation is detected. This function depends upon accurate phonemic perception. Yet, as described in Section 3.2 above, wherever the phoneme repertoires of L1 and L2 differ, phonemic perception is notoriously inaccurate. Second, consider the inter-word competition that is the basis of all word recognition. The vocabulary of an L2 user may be very impoverished compared with that of an L1 listener, so that the correct candidate may not even be available, or the competition may be skewed. But far worse, the L2 listener's competitor set may contain candidates that would simply not bother a native listener. This may on the one hand be words that are not even in the input language -namely, words of the L2 listener's L1. It has repeatedly been demonstrated in non-native listening experiments with advanced learners of an L2 that L2 input can call up words from the L1 vocabulary in parallel with words from the L2 vocabulary. For instance, in experi-ments of the kind described in Section 2.1, in which listeners' looks to various displays are recorded, Russian listeners to English have been found to look at a stamp (Russian: marka) when they hear the English word marker, and Dutch listeners to English have been found to look at a lid (Dutch: deksel) as the English word desk is spoken BIB002  . On the other hand, candidates in the L2 may be unnecessarily activated if the listener's phonemic perception fails to rule them out. If a listener to English cannot tell the difference between /r/ and /l/, for example, then the input regis-may activate candidate words beginning with /l/ as well as words beginning with /r/ -both register and legislate, for example, may be activated, and competing with one another. The listener will not be able to resolve the competition until the sixth phoneme (e.g., regist-) whereas the native listener would have resolved that difference on the first phoneme. This also has been demonstrated in the laboratory (e.g., BIB005 . Each of these factors induces far more competition for the L2 listener than for the L1 listener. In cross-modal priming experiments of the type described in Section 2.1, this added competition has been shown to be not only present in L2 listening, but also especially hard to get rid of Cutler, 2008, 2010; BIB003 . Third, to complicate the issue still further, consider that, as described in Section 2.2, the information processed in listening flows in a cascade through the speech recognition system, so that higher-level processes can resolve lowerlevel alternatives with optimal efficiency. If the L2 listener's phonemic processing is inaccurate, more alternatives are passed on to the word recognition stage, and if the word recognition stage involves more competition than it should, sentence-level context has more work to do to sort it out. In other words, at all levels there will be more uncertainty to be resolved for the L2 than for the L1 listener. Yet the higher-level processes that are here called upon to do more work than is in principle necessary are also themselves less efficient in the case of the L2 listener. L2 listeners do not have the extensive experience with lexical and syntactic transitional probabilities that an L1 listener can call upon, they do not have as fine a sensitivity to the subtle syntactic and pragmatic differences that choice of words can convey, and so on. Again, there is abundant empirical evidence for the poorer syntactic processing skills of the L2 listener  , and the L2 disadvantage here can even be observed when L2 proficiency is high  . A similar L2 disadvantage can be seen with the processing of idioms  BIB006 , and with prosodic processing, at the word level BIB007 , at the phrasal level BIB001 , and at the semantic level BIB004 . Thus while L2 listeners are forced back on higherlevel context to resolve persistent uncertainty resulting from the disruptive effects of noise, their higher-level resources also let them down. We return to this issue in Section 6.