The role of linguistic experience in the processing of probabilistic information in production

Speakers track the probability that a word will occur in a particular context and utilise this information during phonetic processing. For example, content words that have high probability within a discourse tend to be realised with reduced acoustic/articulatory properties. Such probabilistic information may influence L1 and L2 speech processing in distinct ways (reflecting differences in linguistic experience across groups and the overall difficulty of L2 speech processing). To examine this issue, L1 and L2 speakers performed a referential communication task, describing sequences of simple actions. The two groups of speakers showed similar effects of discourse-dependent probabilistic information on production, suggesting that L2 speakers can successfully track discourse-dependent probabilities and use such information to modulate phonetic processing.