Listening in the L1 and the L2

Course content

Understanding in languages we’ve grown up with comes easy (L1), but it’s a challenge in languages we’ve learned later in life (L2). In this seminar, we will examine how speech processing is shaped by language experience and how this influences the recognition of spoken words. We will cover topics such as the universalities common to listening in all languages, how early development shapes listening to become language-specific, and how this can impact L2 listening later in life. Building up on and revising the basic concepts of phonetics and phonology that you have acquired in modules B2 (and A2) we will try to answer psycholinguistic questions such as:

• How do we extract words from speech?
• Why does accented speech pose a challenge to the word recognition system?
• How flexible is L2 speech perception?