The interaction of lexical and phonetic-category learning in speech perception

Lukas Wiget

Second language learners are exposed to, and will eventually acquire, both new lexical items and new phonetic categories. The objective of my PhD research is to discover the ways in which lexical learning can interact with the learning of phonetic categories; in particular, it will address the question of whether or not the acquisition of a (perceptual) lexicon also encourages the formation of (perceptual) phonetic categories. I intend to tackle this issue by using perceptual learning experiments involving small artificial lexica.

In this talk, I wish to present an outline of my principle research question and give a short overview of the experimental methods I intend to be using.