The phonological form of lexical items modulates the encoding of challenging second-language sound contrasts.

The present study investigated whether the ability to encode the sounds of difficult second-language (L2) contrasts into novel nonnative lexical representations is modulated by the phonological form of the words to be learned. In 3 experiments, German learners of English were trained on word-picture associations with either novel minimal pairs only differing in the difficult /ε/-/æ/ contrast (Experiments 1 and 2; e.g.,