Effects of sentential context on nonnative recognition of reduced speech: Does meaning explain it all?

Abstract

In casual speech, reduction of segments or even syllables is common. Native (L1) listeners recover these reduced forms by recruiting not only semantic and syntactic but also fine-grained acoustic cues in the surrounding utterance. Whether second-language (L2) listeners exploit the same constellation of cues is still poorly understood. We therefore compared 21 L1 English listeners and 21 Mandarin learners of English as they identified reduced targets (e.g., /tuɪnə/ ‘too into’) presented in one of three contexts: Isolation, Textual (orthographic context only), and Auditory (orthography plus the original carrier sentence). Accuracy patterns revealed a graded facilitation hierarchy. For L2 listeners, semantic-syntactic information alone (Textual) boosted recognition relative to Isolation, and adding acoustic context produced a further significant gain. Nevertheless, both effects were smaller for L2 than for L1 listeners, indicating less effective contextual integration in the L2 processing mechanism. The findings refine accounts of reduced-speech perception by showing that L2 listeners can harness acoustic context, but less efficiently than L1 listeners.