Influence of phonological, morphological, and prosodic factors on phoneme detection by native and second-language adults

This study investigates how phonology, morphology, and prosody affect phoneme identification within sentences. The influence of these factors was examined in a phoneme monitoring task with Australian-English and Second-Language-English Mandarin-Chinese participants monitoring for /n/ in four morphological contexts (part of a word stem, correct/altered grammatical inflection, or derivational inflection) and two prosodic contexts (medial vs. final utterance position). Analysis of accuracy and reaction time to targets revealed that final position is more beneficial for phoneme detection across both groups, and that non-native listeners profited from first-language-permissible phonological information rather than suffering from absence of morphological features in their native language.