Abstract
The processing of phonotactic patterns is crucial in any language for the recognition of word boundaries in running speech. The present paper reports the results of a reaction time experiment with native Russian and Chinese L2 learners of German. Chinese and Russian differ from German in the complexity of possible sound combinations in the syllable coda, in that Russian allows more consonant sequences and more frequent violation of sonority requirements compared to German, whereas Chinese does not allow complex consonant clusters in final syllable position. Applying an artificial language paradigm, we investigate the role of language-specific requirements of sound sequences in the syllable coda for the processing of L2 phonotactics and the influence of exposure to more or less restrictions on the sonority requirements. In a word-picture matching task, participants were exposed to nonce words with existent and non-existent German final consonant clusters violating sonority requirements or not. Reaction time data were obtained in the recollection of word-picture pairs. The results show that recollection and processing of final consonant clusters is facilitated by both adherence to sonority requirements and the exposure to existing consonant clusters. However, the influence of implicit knowledge of universal phonotactic principles and frequency-based factors varies depending on phonotactic properties of the native language.
