Changes to perceptual assimilation following training

Julia Kharlamenko,Susannah V Levi,Heather M Kabakoff,Erika Levy

doi:10.1121/1.5101678

Julia Kharlamenko, Susannah V Levi + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5101678

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Abstract

Adult speakers of American-English have difficulty perceiving front-back rounding contrasts in vowels, such as French /œ/-/o/. These difficulties stem in part from how learners map sounds in a second language onto native-language sound categories. We used a perceptual-assimilation task to test how perceptual training changes listeners’ mapping of nonnative speech sounds. One listener group was trained with a bimodal distribution of stimuli drawn from an /œ/-/o/ acoustic continuum, a second was trained with a unimodal distribution, and a third (control) group completed no training. The training incorporated active learning with feedback and lexical support. In the assimilation task, listeners heard French vowels and were asked to select which of eight English /hVd/ words best matched the French stimulus. Results revealed general perceptual training effects and differences in both trained groups. For /o/, both trained groups differed significantly from untrained controls. However, for /œ/, listeners in the unimodal group did not differ from the untrained controls, but the bimodal group differed from the untrained controls. Thus, exposure to a unimodal distribution can alter perception, but a bimodal distribution may have stronger effects on perception. Bimodal distribution may be better for facilitating assimilation of nonnative sounds to native-like categories.

Highlights

Attaining native-like proficiency in a second language is difficult for most adults
The organization patterns following this learning paradigm were assessed through a perceptual assimilation task (Best, 1995) in which listeners mapped speech sounds of a non-native language onto labels in their first language
Performance on the perceptual assimilation task was analyzed in R with the “rcompanion” package (Mangiafico, 2016)

Summary

Introduction

Attaining native-like proficiency in a second language is difficult for most adults. Decades of research indicate that young age is a critical factor in second language learning (Baker et al, 2002; Bever, 1981; Flege et al.1999). Once the phonetic categories of one’s native language are solidified, the ability to perceptually distinguish non-native sounds decreases (Flege, 1995; Iverson et al, 2003; Kuhl, 2000; Michaels, 1974). The perception of non-native speech sounds is influenced by similarities between the speech sounds in the first and second languages and by the degree and type of exposure to and familiarity with the second language (Levy, 2009a; Levy and Strange, 2008). We examined listeners’ perceptual organization of non-native vowels following a brief perceptual learning paradigm (distributional learning). The organization patterns following this learning paradigm were assessed through a perceptual assimilation task (Best, 1995) in which listeners mapped speech sounds of a non-native language onto labels in their first language

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