L2 Perception – How, What,Why?
Week 11 Nov 19 2010
Intuitively
• L2 Perception: what role does it play?
• 1) How many categories? Contrasts
– phonemes, allophones, neutralization
• 2) Where are those categories?
– Differences in phonetic implementation 
lexical storage and confusion
Single category assimilation
- How good should discrimination be?
- How good should lexical learning be?
(see Best 1995, Flege 1995, and subsequent)
Two category assimilation
- How good should discrimination be?
- How good should lexical learning be?
(see Best 1995, Flege 1995, and subsequent)
Multiple category assimilation
- How good should discrimination be?
- How good should lexical learning be?
(see Escuedero and Boersma 2002
Perceiving non-native phonotactics
- Repairing to a native segment in that context:
/tl, dl/  [kl, gl] (L1 French, English)
- Repairing to a native string:
/ebzo/  [ebuzo] (L1 Japanese)
/SSV/  [SvSV] (L1 English- but only 15%)
e.g. /zgamo/  [zəgamo]
(see Davidson et al 2007 and refs)
Perceiving non-native phonotactics
- Q: could minimal pairs help L2 learning?
- What do you think?
- If they do or don’t, what does that tell us
about where/when these ‘mistakes’ are made
in the perceptual process?
(see Davidson et al 2007 and refs)
Davidson et al 2007
Experiment 1:
learning words with fric-stop clusters,
without minimal pairs in the trained items
Davidson et al 2007: Exp 1 Results
Condition C: If you learned [zVgamo], it’s hard to
not accept [zegamo], and vice versa.
Davidson et al 2007
Experiment 2:
learning words with fric-stop clusters,
WITH minimal pairs in the trained items
Davidson et al 2007: Exp 2 Testing