When does First Language Support Second Language Speech Perception? The Acoustic-Attentional-Contextual Hypothesis

Abstract

<p>Can second language learners outperform natives on speech perception? In a recent study, Cantonese listeners discriminated English stress more accurately than did English listeners. The present study investigates whether this previous finding generalizes to various pitch accent and vowel reduction contexts. Sixty Cantonese and English listeners completed the English stress discrimination task in various pitch accent and vowel reduction contexts. In the falling pitch accent context without vowel reduction, the Cantonese listeners outdid the English listeners on English stress discrimination. With either rising pitch accent pattern or vowel reduction, the Cantonese advantage disappeared. In the rising pitch accent pattern context with vowel reduction, the Cantonese listeners even performed poorer than the English listeners. The results suggest two constraints of the Cantonese advantage in English stress discrimination—rising pitch accent pattern and vowel reduction. The Acoustic-Attentional-Contextual hypothesis is proposed to conceptualize non-native advantage in speech perception.</p>