This study investigates how native-language (L1) prosody affects second-language (L2) word perception, focusing on whether pitch (F0) is utilized in L2 lexical access. Participants included 178 late L2 English learners with different L1s (Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and French) and 35 native English controls. In a Lexical Decision Task (LDT), segmental and F0 cues were orthogonally manipulated to assess pitch-driven lexical access. A Sequence Recall Task (SRT) tested perception of pitch/stress and segmental contrasts under cognitive load. In the LDT, Mandarin speakers used pitch lexically, while French speakers ignored it. Surprisingly, Japanese speakers, despite having pitch accent, did not use pitch in lexical access, whereas Korean speakers, whose L1 lacks lexical stress, did utilize pitch, likely reinterpreting it as a boundary cue. In the SRT, only speakers from L1s with lexical pitch perceived pitch/stress robustly. English proficiency and working memory did not account for the results. These findings suggest that the role of pitch in L1 does not straightforwardly predict how pitch is integrated into L2 lexical access. Such dissociation between L1 prosody and L2 lexical processing sheds new light on how pitch in typologically diverse L1 systems is repurposed in L2 in a functionally adaptive manner.
Tajima et al. (Wed,) studied this question.