Non-native phonemic discrimination, phonological short term memory, and word learning

•Non-native speech perception abilities are multidimensional and reflect phonological structure.•The relationship between non-native speech perception abilities and early word-learning reflects distinctive feature structure.•Phonological short-term memory predicts early word-learning accuracy.

Accurately perceiving non-native speech sounds is known to be very difficult. Numerous studies provide strong and converging evidence that this difficulty varies systematically, depending on the properties of the non-native sounds and the native language of the listener. There is substantially less research on how phonetic and phonological structure relates to individual differences in the ability to perceive non-native phonemes, though individual differences in auditory abilities are well-documented. The present work reports two experiments aimed at elucidating the structure of individual differences in non-native speech perception and the relationship between these abilities, phonological short term memory, and early second language word learning. In Experiment 1, confirmatory factor analysis of discrimination data for nine non-native contrasts from different languages indicates that voicing and place (segmental) contrasts pattern together and distinct from tone (suprasegmental) contrasts. In Experiment 2, the results indicate that phonological short term memory and discrimination ability both predict word learning accuracy and that discrimination ability does so in a mostly feature-specific manner.