Effects of exposure and training on perception of Japanese length contrasts by English listeners

Abstract

Native English listeners are known to have difficulty distinguishing Japanese words that contrast in phonemic length, often realized as a contrast in vowel or consonant duration. The present study reports results from a series of experiments investigating the extent to which English listeners’ perception of such length contrasts can be modified with exposure to Japanese and with perceptual identification training. Listeners were trained in a minimal‐pair identification paradigm with feedback. A pretest and posttest were also administered, using natural tokens of Japanese words containing various vowel and consonant length contrasts, produced in isolation and in a carrier sentence, at three speaking rates, and by multiple talkers. Results indicated that exposure and perceptual training substantially improved identification accuracy. Even though listeners were trained to identify words contrasting in vowel length only, performance also improved for other contrast types. Furthermore, speaking rate strongly a...