Lexical Knowledge Effects on the Discrimination of Non-Native Phonemic Contrasts in Words and Non-Words by Spanish/Catalan Bilingual Learners of English

This paper reports on the results of a study investigating the effect of L2 lexical knowledge on the perception of nonnative phonemic contrasts. An AX auditory discrimination task was used to test the ability of a group of bilingual Spanish/Catalan advanced learners of English (N=74) to perceive 9 English phonemic contrasts. The aural stimuli consisted of 144 word pairs (108 minimal pairs and 36 distractors), 50% of which were English nonwords. The subjects’ knowledge of the words in the discrimination task was assessed by means of a lexical knowledge post-test. The advanced learners of English were found to be more successful in perceiving nonnative contrasts in minimal pairs with known words than in minimal pairs with nonwords and unknown words. The results reveal that lexical knowledge has a significant effect on the perception of nonnative phonemic contrasts leading to better dicrimination results in the subjects’ performance on known words than on unknown words and nonwords, and suggest that this factor be taken into account in L2 learners’ perceptual ability assessment.