Native phonotactic interference in L2 vowel processing: Mouse-tracking reveals cognitive conflicts during identification

Abstract

Regularities of phoneme distribution in a listener’s native language (L1), i.e., L1 phonotactics, can at times induce interference in their perception of second language (L2) phonemes and phonemic strings. This paper presents a study examining phonological interference experienced by L1 Mandarin listeners in identifying the English /i/ vowel in three consonantal contexts /p, f, w/, which have different distributional patterns in Mandarin phonology: /pi/ is a licit sequence in Mandarin, */fi/ is illicit due to co-occurrence restrictions, and */wi/ is illicit due to Mandarin contextual allophony. L1 Mandarin listeners completed two versions of an identification experiment (keystroke and mouse-tracking), in which they identified vowels in different consonantal contexts. Analysis of error rates, response times, and hand motions in the tasks suggests that L1 co-occurrence restriction and contextual allophony induce different levels of phonological interference in L2 vowel perception compared to the licit control condition. In support of the dynamic theory of linguistic cognition, our results indicate that illicit phonotactic contexts can lead to more identification errors, longer decision processes, and spurious activation of a distractor category.