The role of lexical context and language experience in the perception of foreign-accented segments

When faced with intelligibility problems, listeners resort to contextual information. The present study explores the use of lexical context by listeners when identifying segments with various degrees of foreign accent. Native English listeners identified words into which a single Spanish-accented segment from a 5-step continuum had been inserted. Listeners also identified vowel-consonant or consonant-vowel sequences containing the same accented segments. While lexical context helped, the lexical advantage was largely independent of degree of foreign accent, with a slight benefit only for the most accented consonants. To examine the influence of listeners' first language on the usefulness of lexical context, a second experiment was carried out with Spanish, Japanese and Czech non-native listeners. As was the case for native listeners, there was little evidence that a lexical context helps more for foreign-accented than native segments. Normalised for word familiarity, overall non-native identification patterns were comparable to native listeners' perceptions. Listeners' first language phonetic inventory had an effect on identification levels, particularly in the case of vowels. Lexical context benefits for vowel identification can be explained by their generally less categorical processing, their realisational variability in English, and symbol mapping issues.