Lexical bias in second language perception: Word position, age of arrival, and native language phonology

Abstract

The study examines whether non-native listeners leverage their L2 lexicon during a phonetic identification task and whether lexical bias is influenced by word position and length. Native English and native Mandarin speakers were tested on English words where the natural sibilant was replaced by one member of a nine-step [s]/[ʃ] continuum. English speakers experience a lexical bias effect for longer words. No clear bias was observed for Mandarin participants, although age of arrival correlated with amount of lexical bias but only in the initial position of longer words. These results suggest that language proficiency and higher-order linguistic representations drive perception.