Word frequency effects on L2 learners' phonetic imitations

Word frequency plays an important role in a variety of phonetic phenomena. One of the well-known observations is that low-frequency words exhibit more phonetic imitation than high-frequency words. The previous studies made this observation by exploring L1 phonetic imitation, and the current study extended the findings to L2 learners' phonetic imitations. Thirty Japanese English learners participated in this research and shadowed American English model speech stimuli. The linear combination analyses suggested that low-frequency words show a stronger imitation effect in relation to Bark-scaled F1 values. This finding is discussed in terms of implications for mental representations in the L2 lexicon.