Visual and auditory native language interference in perceptual learning of non-native speech sounds

Abstract

Learning speech sounds in a second language is challenging for adults, especially when non-native phonemes are perceptually similar to those in the native language. Results from Earle and Myers (2015) suggest that auditory exposure to native language tokens that are perceptually similar to a learned non-native phonetic contrast attenuate sleep-mediated gains in perceptual learning. The present study seeks to determine whether activating abstract phonetic category representations through visual input will produce a similar interference effect on a learned non-native phonetic contrast. To test this, we trained participants to identify the Hindi dental and retroflex contrast and reassessed their performance following a period of sleep. Immediately after training, participants were exposed to interference tokens through a pseudohomophone judgment task, in which they were asked to decide if a string of letters spelled out a real word when read aloud (e.g., “drane” = drain). One group read words with /d/-initia...