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Abstract:
We investigated whether non-native listeners can
exploit phonetic detail in recognizing potentially
ambiguous utterances, as native listeners can [6, 7,
8, 9, 10]. Due to the phenomenon of intrusive /r/,
the English phrase extra ice may sound like extra
rice. A production study indicates that the intrusive
/r/ can be distinguished from the onset /r/ in rice,
as it is phonetically weaker. In two cross-modal
identity priming studies, however, we found no
conclusive evidence that Dutch learners of English
are able to make use of this difference. Instead,
auditory primes such as extra rice and extra ice
with onset and intrusive /r/s activate both types of
targets such as ice and rice. This supports the
notion of spurious lexical activation in L2
perception.
