The recognition of Japanese-accented and unaccented English words by Japanese listeners

This study investigated whether Japanese listeners learning English employ two types of lexical information (word frequency and neighborhood density) when they recognize English words. English words recorded by a native speaker of English and a native speaker of Japanese were presented to Japanese university students in a noise condition. The results of word recognition scores showed that Japanese listeners employed both lexical and pre-lexical levels of information in English word recognition. They were sensitive to both probabilistic phonotactics (bottom-up acoustic information) and word frequency (lexical information). A strong correlation between probabilistic phonotactics and neighborhood density still predict Japanese listeners are influenced by neighborhood density in English word recognition.