Does difficulty perceiving American English /r/ and /l/ affect Japanese listeners’ lexical confusion of these phonemes?

Phonetic environment has proven to be one of the most important factors affecting non‐native English speakers’ perception of American English /r/ and /l/ [e.g., Lively et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 96, 2076–2087 (1994)]. In the present study native Japanese speakers’ lexical confusion of English /r/ and /l/ are examined through a word translation experiment which employed pairs of English words minimally contrasting /r/ and /l/ in various word positions. Results indicate that English words in which the /r/ or /l/ is located in a perceptually difficult to identify position (e.g., initial consonant cluster: ‘‘branch’’ versus ‘‘blanch’’) are more likely to be mistranslated than those in which the phoneme is located in an easy to identify position (e.g., final singleton: ‘‘compare’’ versus ‘‘compel’’). This finding suggests that errors in phoneme perception and lexical confusion might be related. Pedagogical implications for second language learning will be discussed with respect to results from both learning a...