The Role of High Variability Phonetic Training on Chinese EFL Learners' Perception of English Vowels in Noisy Environment

Abstract

High variability phonetic training (HVPT) can improve nonnative vowel perception. However, most HVPT studies were conducted in quiet conditions, and it remains unclear whether the training effect was generalizable to noisy environments. This study investigated the effect of HVPT on Chinese EFL learners&#x0027; identification and discrimination of two challenging English tense-lax vowel contrasts <tex>$/\alpha/-/\Lambda/$</tex> and /i/-/I/ in noisy conditions. Twenty-four Chinese college students participated in this study. A pretest-training-posttest paradigm was adopted. Participants were trained with English vowel contrasts produced by 10 native speakers of American English using an identification task. Half participants were tested in quiet conditions and the other half in noisy conditions using identification and discrimination tasks. The results showed that listeners&#x0027; vowel perception performance in both quiet and noisy conditions improved after training, though the improvement varied across vowels. These results thus have implications for HVPT in daily speech communication environments with noise.