Monitoring English sandhi-linking- a study of Polish listeners' L2 perception

Abstract

This paper presents a set of word monitoring experiments with Polish learners of English. Listeners heard short recordings of native English speech, and were instructed to respond when they recognized an English target word that had been presented on a computer screen. Owing to phonological considerations, we compared reaction times to two types of vowel-initial words, which had been produced either with glottalization, or had been joined via sandhi linking processes to the preceding word. Results showed that the effects of the glottalization as a boundary cue were less robust than expected. Implications of these findings for models of L2 speech are discussed. It is suggested that the prevalence of glottalization in L1 production makes listeners less sensitive to its effects as a boundary cue in L2.