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I can't understand. The perception of native and non-native can and can’t by native and non-native listeners of English

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Ernestus,  Mirjam
Center for Language Studies , External Organizations;
Research Associates, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Ernestus, M., Kouwenhoven, H., & Van Mulken, M. (2017). I can't understand. The perception of native and non-native can and can’t by native and non-native listeners of English. Poster presented at the Workshop Conversational Speech and Lexical Representations, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0002-5796-3
Abstract
This study investigates how the comprehension of casual speech in foreign languages is affected by the phonotactic
constraints in the listener’s native language. Non-native listeners of English with different native languages heard short
English phrases produced by native speakers of English or Spanish and they indicated whether these phrases included can or
can’t. Native Mandarin listeners especially tended to interpret can’t as can. We interpret this result as a direct effect of the ban
on word-final /nt/ in Mandarin and of these listeners’ low proficiency in English. Both the native Mandarin and the native
Spanish listeners did not take full advantage of the subsegmental information in the speech signal cueing reduced can’t. This
finding is probably an indirect effect of the phonotactic constraints in their native languages: these listeners have difficulties
interpreting the subsegmental cues because these cues do not occur or have different functions in their native languages.
Dutch resembles English in the phonotactic constraints relevant to the comprehension of can’t, and native Dutch listeners
showed similar patterns in their comprehension of native and non-native English to native English listeners. This result
supports our conclusion that the major patterns in the comprehension results are driven by the phonotactic constraints in the
listeners’ native languages.
This study appeared as M. Ernestus, H. Kouwenhoven, & M. van Mulken (2017). The direct and indirect effects of the
phonotactic constraints in the listener's native language on the comprehension of reduced and unreduced word pronunciation
variants in a foreign language. Journal of Phonetics 62, 50-64.