Individual differences in late bilinguals' L2 phonological processes: From acoustic-phonetic analysis to lexical access

The extent to which the phonetic system of a second language is mastered varies across individuals. The present study evaluates the pattern of individual differences in late bilinguals across different phonological processes. Fifty-five late Dutch-English bilinguals were tested on their ability to perceive a difficult 12 speech contrast (the English /ae/-/epsilon/ contrast) in three different tasks: A categorization task, a word identification task and a lexical decision task. As a group, 12 listeners were less accurate than native listeners. However. at the individual level, almost half of the 12 listeners scored within the native range in the categorization task whereas a small percentage scored within the native range in the identification and lexical decision tasks. These results show that 12 listeners' performance crucially depends on the nature of the task, with higher 12 listener accuracy on an acoustic-phonetic analysis task than on tasks involving lexical processes. These findings parallel previous results for early bilinguals, where the pattern of performance was consistent with the processing hierarchy proposed by different models of speech perception. The results indicate that the analysis of patterns of non-native performance can provide important insights concerning the architecture of the speech perception system and the issue of language learnability. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.