Influence of perceptual training of syllable codas for English consonants on sentences.

Abstract

This study extends our previous report suggesting that moderate amounts of speech perception training were associated with improved speech production. This study also examined perception in sentences. A new group of 8 Spanish speakers (<10 year residence in US) trained on 13 English final consonants in syllables using SPATS software. On days 1 and 7 the group participated in perception and production tasks with the 13 codas (pre‐ and post‐tests). Perception tests included coda identification in both syllable stimuli and in 18 sentences extracted from the IEEE corpus (90 keywords). Results showed the following. (1)With 5‐h training of the 13 codas in syllable stimuli, perception improved significantly (>10%) in the syllable post‐test, with smaller improvement in the sentence post‐test (>7%). (2) Although average improvement was small for codas tested in sentences, several improved substantially (>20%), while a few decreased considerably after perception training. (3) Absolute values in both post‐tests show similar performance, near 90%, although interesting differences for specific consonants were noted. The results showed that perception of sounds when measured in different linguistic contexts (syllables versus sentences) rendered different results. The study lays ground for investigating how cross‐language perception of individual sounds is influenced by the phonetic context.