The Effect of Overnight Consolidation on English Vowel Perception by Chinese Learners After High Speaker Variability Phonetic Training

Abstract

Chinese students face challenges to perceive English tense-lax vowel contrasts /i/-/I/ and /α/-/ /^/. Although high variability phonetic training (HVPT) can benefit non-native vowel perception in a long term, it is unclear whether it can help Chinese students perceive these vowels in a short term. Furthermore, it is suggested sleep can benefit non-native consonants perception, while whether it is also effective in non-native vowel perception remains unclear. To answer this question, we invited 24 Chinese students as participants. Thirty English vowel pairs were recorded by 10 native speakers as stimuli. A pretest-training-posttest paradigm was adopted. Listeners were trained either in the morning (Day group) or evening (Night group) with the identification task. They were tested pre-training and post-training (0h, 12hs, and 24hs after training) with identification and discrimination tasks. The results show that HVPT was effective for most vowels, while overnight consolidation effect was not found and potential reasons were discussed.