Second language learners acquire reduced word forms just like they acquire full forms

Abstract

We investigated the effect of auditory exposure on the recognition of full (i.e., canonical) and reduced (i.e., with weakened or deleted sounds) word forms by beginner second language (L2) learners. We taught three participant groups the same French schwa words. One group was trained only on the full (i.e., with schwa) forms, one group on the reduced forms (i.e., without schwa) only, and one group on both the full and reduced forms of each word. We then tested participants’ recognition of both forms in an auditory lexical decision task. We found that participants’ accuracy for a form was proportional to the exposure they received at training for that form. Both participants’ groups trained on one form recognized the untrained form in about a third of the trials. We conclude that exposure is a crucial factor in learning L2 reduced forms and that listeners use both retrieval from storage and goodness of fit (including reconstruction) mechanisms, in the same way for full as for reduced forms.