This study investigated the effect of phonological neighborhood density (PND) on the lexical encoding of perceptually confusable segmental contrasts and the extent to which the precision of encoding is modulated by phonetic categorization and vocabulary size. Korean learners of English and native speakers of American English completed an auditory lexical decision task that contained words and nonwords with /ɛ/, /æ/, /f/, and /p/ (/æ/ and /f/ do not exist in Korean), two phonetic categorization tasks (/ɛ/−/æ/ and /f/−/p/), and a vocabulary test. For the Korean group, participants’ categorization of /f/−/p/ was the only significant predictor of /f/−/p/ nonword rejection. For /ɛ/−/æ/, nonword versions of high PND words were rejected more accurately than low PND. Additionally, vocabulary size and phonetic categorization significantly interacted so that as perception abilities improve, the benefits that come from having a large vocabulary grow as well.

中文翻译：

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语音邻域密度、语音分类和词汇量对简单和困难的 L2 分段对比的语音编码产生差异


本研究调查了语音邻域密度 （PND） 对感知易混淆片段对比的词汇编码的影响，以及编码精度受语音分类和词汇量调节的程度。韩语英语学习者和以美式英语为母语的人完成了一项听觉词汇决策任务，其中包含带有 /ɛ/、/æ/、/f/ 和 /p/ 的单词和非单词（/æ/ 和 /f/ 在韩语中不存在）、两个语音分类任务（/ɛ/−/æ/ 和 /f/−/p/）和一个词汇测试。对于韩国组，参与者对 /f/−/p/ 的分类是 /f/−/p/ 非单词拒绝的唯一重要预测因子。对于 /ɛ/−/æ/，高 PND 单词的非单词版本比低 PND 更准确地被拒绝。此外，词汇量和语音分类显着交互，因此随着感知能力的提高，拥有大量词汇量带来的好处也会增加。