Spoken utterances are continuous and contain few reliable word boundary cues for the listener. To understand a spoken utterance a listener must isolate individual words from the speech stream. This lexical segmentation process is influenced by competition between candidate words and knowledge of native phonology (such as knowledge about phonotactic constraints). A recent study using the word spotting task has shown that Dutch listeners find it easier to detect a word at the end of a nonsense sequence when the beginning of the word is aligned with a syllable boundary than when it is misaligned.
Adult listeners are language-specific perceivers. Therefore speech segmentation differs across listeners as a function of their native language. Whereas the sequence /sm/ may cue a clear syllable boundary for German listeners due to phonotactic constraints, the same sequence may not be a clear boundary for English listeners.
The present study seeks to examine the effects of native phonotactic constraints on segmentation of a nonnative language. Since phonotactic cues help to solve the segmentation problem in native listening, and processing of a nonnative language is influenced by the native language, one wonders how nonnative segmentation is influenced by native phonotactic alignment or misalignment.
This question is being addressed using the word spotting task in a study of English and German. In /biS leg/, leg is aligned with a syllable boundary by English phonotactics, but not by German. In /kitleg/, leg is aligned for both languages. If German listeners respond more slowly to leg in the former, this would show that listeners make use of their native phonotactic constraints in segmenting a nonnative language. If German listeners are more slowly to detect an English word which is aligned with a clear syllable boundary according to German phonotactics (but not according to English phonotactics, e.g., leg in /tusleg/) than an English word which is aligned with syllable boundaries defined by the phonotactics of both languages (e.g., leg in /kitleg/), this would show that listeners make use of phonotactic constraints of their learned nonnative language when segmenting it.
The results of the present study can confirm the role of phonotactics in segmenting continuous speech and shed light on the how nonnative segmentation is influenced by both native and nonnative phonotactic constraints.