In contrast to the first example, the decoding errors seem strongly linked to an intrusion
problem related to learners’ inability to distinguish between members of the minimal pair /b/
and /v/, and it seemed they had assimilated both sounds to Japanese /b/. This error with
respect to the first syllable seems to have activated three potential candidates (at least), which were all semantically appropriate to the context (i.e., bank, bag, back). Japanese /b/ is
the initial sound in the morae /ba/, /bi/, /bu/, /be/, and /bo/. The first of these, /ba/, appeared
to influence 8 learners towards choosing “bar”, overriding both the /æ/ phoneme information
in the first syllable and that “bar” was semantically inappropriate to the given context.