Herkenning Van Fragmenten Van Gesproken Nederlandse Woorden Door Nederlanders En Niet-Nederlanders.

This paper reports an experiment examining the amount of auditory stimulus information needed by native and non-native listeners in order to achieve correct recognition of spoken words. The words used are all polysyllabic and of a high frequency of occurrence. The words were presented in ever-increasing word fragments, the first of each word presenting the word onset, the last presenting the complete word. Variability between twenty native subjects in the number of fragments per word needed for correct recognition was small. Non-native subjects needed systematically more fragments and showed a greater variability. The results suggest that the present method can in principle be used to examine the skill of each second language learner in recognizing spoken words from fragmentary information. Combined with other tests, specifically directed at other aspects of listening proficiency such as vocabulary size, and the efficient use of syntactic, semantic and extra-linguistic knowledge, these tests can be used to spot specific deficiencies in listening proficiency.