Effects of discrimination training on the perception of /r-l/ by Japanese adults learning English

Abstract

and SIBYLLA DITTMANN University ofMinnesota, Minneapolis, MinnesotaNative Japanese speakers learning English have difficulty perceptually differentiating the liquid consonants Irl and Ill, even after extensive conversational instruction. Using a samedifferent discrimination task with immediate feedback, eight adult female Japanese were given extensive training on a synthetic "rock"-"lock" stimulus series. Performance improved gradually for all subjects over the 14 to 18 training sessions. Comparisons of pretraining and posttraining categorical perception tests with the training stimuli indicated transfer of training to the more demanding identification and oddity discrimination tasks for seven of the eight subjects. Five of seven subjects also improved in identification and oddity discrimination of an acoustically dissimilar "rake"-"lake" synthetic series. However, transfer did not extend to natural speech words contrasting initiallrl and Ill. It was concluded that modification of perception of some phonetic contrasts in adulthood is slow and effortful, but that improved laboratory training tasks may be useful in establishing categorical perception of these contrasts. 131In the phonological system of a particular language, only a subset of all possible phonetic contrasts are utilized to differentiate lexical items. Different languages utilize different subsets of phonetic contrasts; thus, the patterns of speech production and perception for a speaker-hearer are constrained by the phonological system of his or her native language. It has long been known that, for adults, learning a new pattern of speech production in a foreign language is problematic. The persistence of a foreign accent includes, among other things, a failure to produce phonetic contrasts appropriately in the new language, contrasts that are not

Brain potentials to native phoneme discrimination reveal the origin of individual differences in learning the sounds of a second language

“…The analysis revealed differences between groups of participants (F (1,28) ϭ 4.28, P Ͻ 0.05; GP ϭ Ϫ0.58 V, PP ϭ Ϫ0.20 V). As expected, there was a generator effect (F (1,28) ϭ 186.78, P Ͻ 0.001) due to the reversal of the frontal negativity in supratemporal sites (frontal ϭ Ϫ1.42 V, mastoids ϭ 0.64 V). This analysis also showed an interaction between group of participants and MMN generator (F (1, 28) ϭ 6.52, P Ͻ 0.05).…”

“…The factor group did not interact with any other factor. Also, the amplitude of the MMN was larger over central than frontal electrodes (F (1,28) The t test of the MMN mean amplitude for the duration, frequency, pattern, Significant differences: * , P Ͻ 0.05; ** , P Ͻ 0.001. df, degrees of freedom. and subcomponent (eMMN vs. lMMN).…”

“…This difficulty in learning a new speech sound system also has consequences for comprehension of the nonnative language. For example, most Japanese native speakers may consider that the English words /rock/ and /lock/ are the same word (1), because the Japanese speech-sound system does not distinguish between the phonemes /r/ and /l/. However, individuals differ significantly in the degree to which they master a nonnative phonetic code, and factors such as the age of acquisition, the amount of exposure, and motivational constraints have a crucial role in final phonetic attainment (2).…”

Individual differences in the acquisition of second language phonology

“…Training was discontinued either once a participant achieved criterion on this last contrast, or once they had completed a maximum of 200 trials (10 blocks), and lasted twenty to thirty minutes per stimulus type. This is a short training session compared to the amount of training that is typically administered in other phonetic training studies, where it ranges from 1 to 18 training sessions lasting up to an hour each (Carney, Widin, & Viemeister, 1977;Golestani & Zatorre, 2004;Pisoni, Aslin, Perey, & Hennessy, 1982;Strange & Dittmann, 1984).…”

Influence of aging on perceptual learning of English phonetic contrasts by native speakers of Japanese

“…It is clear that the elderly adults showed significant hearing loss at higher frequencies. Procedure A pretest/post-test design used by Strange and Dittmann [4] was modified and employed as the experimental design. In Strange and Dittmann, the pretest and post-test were administered before and after the training period, but in the current study, mid-tests were also administered during the training period.…”