The Effects of Syllable Sequence Frequency on EFL Learners' Speech Recognition

抄録

　　Previous studies of visual and spoken word recognition that focused specifically on the recognition of individual content words have reported the word frequency effect. A problem arises, however, when considering the fact that most high frequency words are monosyllabic content words and function words that are difficult to recognize in continuous L2 speech. No study has yet to clarify a word frequency effect in L2 speech recognition. However, instead of a word frequency effect, the present study aimed to examine whether the frequency effect is found in syllable sequences, as the unit of processing spoken words is considered to be a phonological unit of combined syllables rather than an individual word. In the study, 63 university students in Japan participated in a sentence dictation task where each sentence contained tri-syllabic sequences with high and low frequencies of occurrence based on the database of 18 authorized English textbooks used in Japanese junior high schools. The results of ANOVA and correlation analyses revealed that the frequency of individual syllables or words does not relate to the recognition of speech, whereas the frequency is significant for syllable sequences larger than a word. The findings clarified the importance of the intentional rather than incidental learning of phonological words for better speech processing in EFL settings.