Free Allophonic Variation in Native and Second Language Spoken Word Recognition: The Case of the German Rhotic.

The question of how listeners deal with different phonetic variant forms for the same words in perception has sparked great interest over the past few decades, especially with regard to lenited and regional forms. However, the perception of free variant forms of allophones within the same syllable position remains surprisingly understudied. Because of this, in the present study, we investigate how free allophonic variation in the realization of the German rhotic (/r/) impacts spoken word recognition for native German listeners and two groups of non-native listeners (French and Italian learners of German).

My English sounds better than yours: Second-language learners perceive their own accent as better than that of their peers.

Second language (L2) learners are often aware of the typical pronunciation errors that speakers of their native language make, yet often persist in making these errors themselves. We hypothesised that L2 learners may perceive their own accent as closer to the target language than the accent of other learners, due to frequent exposure to their own productions. This was tested by recording 24 female native speakers of German producing 60 sentences.

The impact of one's own voice and production skills on word recognition in a second language.

Second language (L2) learners often speak with a strong accent, which can make them difficult to understand. However, familiarity with an accent enhances intelligibility. We propose that L2 learners are even more familiar with their own accented speech patterns and may thus understand self-produced L2 words better than others' accented productions, presumably because of adaptation.