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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.

Sec. Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience

Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1483046

This article is part of the Research TopicAcquisition, Processing, and Maintenance of a New Language: Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Sequential Bi/MultilingualismView all 13 articles

Frequency of use and sonority sequencing in first-and second-language consonant cluster perception: Facilitation is language-specific

Provisionally accepted
  • 1University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany
  • 2Technical University of Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany
  • 3Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Expectations derived from knowledge about the likelihood of different phoneme sequences are an effective cognitive mechanism to make the listening process more efficient. In addition to language-specific distributions, universal principles of well-formedness may play a role, especially in second language listening, where the listeners are less familiar with the target language. In our study, we compared two listener groups to investigate the relative influences of consonant cluster frequency and consonant sequencing in accordance with the Sonority Sequencing Principle on the perception of initial consonant clusters in German. In Experiment 1, first-language (L1) German listeners identified noise-embedded nonce words with initial consonant clusters. In Experiment 2, Australian learners of German completed the same task. Results showed that German consonant cluster frequency had a significant facilitating influence on perception accuracy for both groups, which was even more pronounced for the L2 listeners. Conformity with the Sonority Sequencing Principle, on the other hand, had a significant inhibitory effect for both listener groups, contrary to expectations. This suggests that it is experience with language-specific distributions that guides sublexical speech processing, also in an L2, while sonority sequencing does not play a facilitative role but rather seems to be correlated with a factor inhibiting successful recognition.

Keywords: consonant cluster, frequency of use, phonotactics, Sonority Sequencing Principle, sublexical speech processing, Speech Perception, L2 perception

Received: 19 Aug 2024; Accepted: 01 Aug 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Wulfert, Auer and Hanulikova. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Sophia Wulfert, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, 79085, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany

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