Abstract
Audiovisual training has proven successful for improving Japanese adults’ identification accuracy of the English /r/-/l/ contrast. However, its effects on Japanese children have not been investigated yet. In the present study, 10 sessions of audiovisual English /r/-/l/ identification training were given to Japanese adults and children, and the age effects on learning the contrast in three testing conditions (audio-only, visual-only and audiovisual) were examined. It was hypothesized that children would improve their visual perception more than adults and they would show more audiovisual advantage than adults (i.e., higher improvement in the audiovisual condition than in the audio-only and visual-only conditions). The results demonstrated that both adults and children improved their identification accuracy in all three conditions, and the increase of the identification accuracy in the audiovisual condition was higher than that in the audio-only condition. However, there was no significant difference in improvement between adults and children. Due to a possible ceiling effect, it was unclear whether children had an advantage over adults in integrating visual information to auditory perception.
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