Individual differences in L2 learners' perceptual cue weighting patterns

This study investigated how English learners of Korean weigh multiple acoustic cues, namely VOT and f0, in perceiving the Korean stop laryngeal contrast. This question is of interest because VOT is more central to this contrast in English relative to Korean. Our goal was to examine whether L2 cueweighting strategies were influenced by individual differences in cue-weighting strategies in L1 and by individual learner’s L2 proficiency. The phoneme identification tasks [English /t/ vs. /d/; Korean /t/ vs. /t/] with 20 English learners showed that listeners who relied more on VOT in English relied less on f0 in Korean. Further, listeners who relied more on f0 in English in an ambiguous VOT condition also relied more on f0 in Korean. L2 proficiency was a significant predictor of both of these relationships. These results suggest that both attention to secondary cues in L1 and L2 proficiency influence cue-weighting strategies in L2.