Abstract
Native Japanese speakers learning English have difficulty perceptually differentiating the liquid consonants /r/ and /l/, even after extensive conversational instruction. Using a same-different discrimination task with immediate feedback, eight adult female Japanese were given extensive training on a synthetic “rock”-“lock” stimulus series. Performance improved gradually for all subjects over the 14 to 18 training sessions. Comparisons of pretraining and posttraining categorical perception tests with the training stimuli indicated transfer of training to the more demanding identification and oddity discrimination tasks for seven of the eight subjects. Five of seven subjects also improved in identification and oddity discrimination of an acoustically dissimilar “rake”-“lake” synthetic series. However, transfer did not extend to natural speech words contrasting initial /r/ and /V/, It was concluded that modification of perception of some phonetic contrasts in adulthood is slow and effortful, but that improved laboratory training tasks may be useful in establishing categorical perception of these contrasts.
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This research was supported by a grant to James J Jenkins and Winifred Strange, “Studies of Speech Perception” (MH-21153), and by grants to the Center for Research in Human Learning from NICHHD (HD-01136) and NSF (BNS-772-22075). Preparation of the manuscript was supported by MH-37924. Portions of this work were reported at the 7th Annual Minnesota Regional Conference on Language and Linguistics, Minneapolis, 1981, and at the 22nd annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, November 1981.
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Strange, W., Dittmann, S. Effects of discrimination training on the perception of /r-l/ by Japanese adults learning English. Perception & Psychophysics 36, 131–145 (1984). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03202673
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03202673