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Updated: May 26, 2026

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: June 25, 2019
Sink positive: linguistic experience with th substitutions influences nonnative word recognition
Adriana Hanulíková1, Andrea Weber
1Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. adriana.hanulikova@mpi.nl
Abstract:
We used eyetracking, perceptual discrimination, and production tasks to examine the influences of perceptual similarity and linguistic experience on word recognition in nonnative (L2) speech. Eye movements to printed words were tracked while German and Dutch learners of English heard words containing one of three pronunciation variants (/t/, /s/, or /f/) of the interdental fricative /θ/. Irrespective of whether the speaker was Dutch or German, looking preferences for target words with /θ/ matched the preferences for producing /s/ variants in German speakers and /t/ variants in Dutch speakers (as determined via the production task), while a control group of English participants showed no such preferences. The perceptually most similar and most confusable /f/ variant (as determined via the discrimination task) was never preferred as a match for /θ/. These results suggest that linguistic experience with L2 pronunciations facilitates recognition of variants in an L2, with effects of frequency outweighing effects of perceptual similarity.
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