Enhancing learning on foreign-accent adaptation with a combination of active training and passive stimulus exposure

Abstract

Improvement on most perceptual tasks requires active performance of the target task during training. However, there has been little consideration of whether that active performance is necessary throughout the entire practice period. Suggesting that it is not, there is recent evidence that active performance on a simple frequency‐discrimination task, interleaved with passive stimulus exposures, can yield more learning than the active performance alone. The current study examines whether these findings extend to a speech‐learning task, specifically foreign‐accent adaptation. Native‐English speakers transcribed sentences spoken in English by non‐native speakers. Participants who performed the target task for half the training period and received passive stimulus exposures while performing a distracter task for the other half out‐performed participants who received the same amount of active training, but no passive exposures during the distracter task, suggesting that passive exposures enhanced learning. The active‐passive group also out‐performed participants who received only passive exposures—and performed as well as a group who performed only the target task—for the entire training period. Taken together, these results suggest that the combination of active training and passive stimulus exposure may play a key role in real‐world perceptual learning for speech. [Work supported by NIH/NIDCD.]