What is so special about words?
Learning the sounds that make up the words in a second language is challenging. Not just because some of these sounds are new, because also of the influence of our L1 phonological knowledge, which can affect what the words sound like, at first. Other things we know about the words, like their spelling, also can influence the way learners memorize the sounds in words.
We store all the words we know in a mental dictionary in long-term memory: We have an entry for each word, in L1 and L2.
What do we know when we know a word?
- What it means.
- How to use it in a sentence – noun/verb, when and with whom to use it (formal/colloquial etc.).
- How to write it, pronounce it, we know its form.
The words are stored in networks – like phonological or semantic networks.
The link between phonological knowledge and the words is that phonology is not just a system used for the perception and production of speech sounds. It is also encoded (i.e. stored) in the representations people create for the words. And learning the sounds of words is not always easy in a second language.
Our research on the bilingual mental lexicon shows that L2 learners have imprecise phonolexical representations in L2: they know the words with their meaning and many other things, but the way they remember the sounds of words in their long-term memory is lacking some detail, especially for confusable sounds. It is a bit like having a "phonological typo" in the mental lexicon.
How do we know what these representations are like?
In this area of research, we use techniques like lexical decision to approach the precision with which L2 words are memorized in learners' long term memory. We also examine which factors facilitate or hinder this precision.
Why is this important?
One consequence is that the representations learners create for all the words can be imprecise. We call this "imprecise L2 phono-lexical representations". The consequences of having such representations can be wide-ranging, because they are central for using language. They impact production – and intelligibility, but also spoken word recognition, sentence processing, and the ability to decode spoken conversation in everyday life. They also impact reading and writing in L2. We believe that they are also part of what makes listening in L2 particularly challenging! 55% of learners report not being able to recognize words they know during listening (Goh, 2000).