Insights into L2 Connected Speech Segmentation: A Gating Experiment with Listeners of Different English Proficiency Levels

Résumé En

The relative contribution of bottom-up (i.e., acoustic-phonetic) and top-down (i.e., contextual) cues for successful L2 online segmentation is still a matter of debate. This study used the gating paradigm to investigate the segmentation processes of adult L2 English listeners with different proficiency levels, by looking at the type of cues they exploit and how they revise their hypotheses as connected speech is progressively revealed. Twenty-one French and Tunisian undergraduates were selected from a larger pool (n = 226) and identified as skilled (n = 11) and unskilled (n = 10) listeners based on their scores on standardized English listening and vocabulary tests. Descriptive statistics, analysis of variance and qualitative analysis were performed on the obtained data. Overall, this study provides supporting L2 evidence for the hierarchical nature of the multiple speech segmentation cues (Mattys et al., 2005). The results indicated an early effect of context on segmentation independent of L2 proficiency when the context is constraining. In non-constraining contexts, successful segmentation is delayed for both groups, with unskilled L2 listeners needing far more bottom-up information to process input and revise their segmentation hypotheses. We conclude that, in online L2 speech segmentation, what distinguishes proficient from non-proficient listeners is their efficient processing of bottom-up cues. Pedagogical implications are provided, hoping to help L2 English teachers (and materials developers) focus on bottom-up training to improve their learners’ real-time comprehension competence.