The Influence of Native Phonology, Allophony, and Phonotactics on Nonnative Lexical Encoding: A Vocabulary Training Study

Second language (L2) speakers often experience difficulties in learning words with L2‐specific phonemes due to the unfaithful lexical encoding predicted by the fuzzy lexical representations hypothesis. Currently, there is limited understanding of how allophonic variation in the first language (L1) i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inLanguage learning Vol. 74; no. 1; pp. 146 - 183
Main Authors Zheng, Qi, Gor, Kira
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Hoboken Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.03.2024
Subjects
allophonic variation
Chinese languages
Constraints
Educational activities
Language varieties
lexical encoding
Mandarin
memory consolidation
nonnative listeners
Nonnative speakers
Phonemes
Phonemics
phonological categorization
Phonological rules
Phonology
Phonotactics
Second language learning
Second language vocabulary learning
Vocabulary Development
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Summary:Second language (L2) speakers often experience difficulties in learning words with L2‐specific phonemes due to the unfaithful lexical encoding predicted by the fuzzy lexical representations hypothesis. Currently, there is limited understanding of how allophonic variation in the first language (L1) influences L2 phonological and lexical encoding. We report how the Mandarin Chinese L1 phonemic inventory and allophonic variation subject to phonotactic constraints predict phonological encoding problems for novel L2 English words with the /v/–/w/ contrast. L1 English and L1 Chinese participants speaking two varieties of Mandarin Chinese differing as to the presence of [ʋ]–[w] allophonic variation for the /w/ phoneme participated in a vocabulary learning task. The novel L2 words with the /v/–/w/ contrast were systematically less robustly encoded than the control words on the day of training and 24 hours later. The degree of fuzziness in lexical representations was jointly predicted by L1 allophonic variation subject to phonotactic constraints and L2 phonological categorization. A one‐page Accessible Summary of this article in non‐technical language is freely available in the Supporting Information online and at https://oasis‐database.org
Bibliography:Accessible Summary
Kira Gor
https://oasis‐database.org
Qi Zheng
CRediT author statement
The handling editor for this manuscript was Theres Grüter.
Supporting Information
online and at
We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the Associate Editor, Professor Theres Grüter, for their insightful suggestions regarding this article throughout the review process. We are also very grateful to Robert DeKeyser, Nan Jiang, Steven J. Ross, Gregory R. Hancock, Tracy Sweet, Yang Liu, Maria Polinsky, Marek Majer, Catherine Pulupa, Caitlin Burke, Chae Mamayek, Jason Struck, Matt Coss, Wei Yi, Xu Li, Hongyang Zhao, Yun Lü, Yuting Sun, Yaxin Zhang, Zhiyuan Deng, Liuan Yang, and Rachel Chang for their support with various aspects of the study.
conceptualization (lead); formal analysis; investigation; methodology (lead); software; writing – original draft preparation (lead); writing – review & editing (equal).
conceptualization (supporting); methodology (supporting); writing – original draft preparation (supporting); writing – review & editing (equal).
of this article in non‐technical language is freely available in the
A one‐page
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ISSN:0023-8333
1467-9922
DOI:10.1111/lang.12581