Effect of lexical access and meaningful linguistic context on second language speech perception

Novel second language (L2) phonemic contrasts are difficult for learners to perceive and produce. Yet research has shown that even difficult L2 phonemic contrasts can be learned under some circumstances. Most of this research has been done in laboratory settings, using tasks that do not closely resemble natural communication. Among other characteristics, natural communication differs from these laboratory tasks in that (1) lexical access is usually not required in the laboratory tasks, and (2) target words in laboratory tasks are usually not embedded in meaningful linguistic context. This thesis describes an experiment designed to test whether these two characteristics of natural communication make it more difficult for learners to perceive L2 phonemic contrasts. The results of this experiment show that both requiring lexical access and embedding target words in meaningful linguistic context reduce the L2 learners' ability to use phonemic contrasts to distinguish L2 minimal pairs, but that processing meaningful linguistic context affects L2 perception more than does lexical access.