Resolving ambiguity in familiar and unfamiliar casual speech

In British English, the phrase Canada aided can sound like Canada raided if the speaker links the two vowels at the word boundary with an intrusive /r/. There are subtle phonetic differences between an onset /r/ and an intrusive /r/, however. With cross-modal priming and eye-tracking, we examine how native British English listeners and non-native (Dutch) listeners deal with the lexical ambiguity arising from this language-specific connected speech process. Together the results indicate that the presence of /r/ initially activates competing words for both listener groups; however, the native listeners rapidly exploit the phonetic cues and achieve correct lexical selection. In contrast, The Dutch-native advanced L2 listeners to English failed to recover from the /r/-induced competition, and failed to match native performance in either task. The /r/-intrusion process, which adds a phoneme to speech input, thus causes greater difficulty for L2 listeners than connected-speech processes which alter or delete phonemes.

► In connected speech, speakers can delete and add segments in the speech stream. ► One segment-addition case is British English r-insertion (as in “law[r]and order”). ► We show that native listeners compensate for this intrusion, but L2 learners cannot. ► Phonetic naturalness influences L2 attainment for connected-speech processes.