Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/. II: The role of phonetic environment and talker variability in learning new perceptual categories
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Two experiments were carried out to extend Logan et al.’s recent study [J. S. Logan, S. E. Lively, and D. B. Pisoni, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 89, 874–886 (1991)] on training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/. Subjects in experiment 1 were trained in an identification task with multiple talkers who produced English words containing the /r/–/l/ contrast in initial singleton, initial consonant clusters, and intervocalic positions. Moderate, but significant, increases in accuracy and decreases in response latency were observed between pretest and posttest and during training sessions. Subjects also generalized to new words produced by a familiar talker and novel words produced by an unfamiliar talker. In experiment 2, a new group of subjects was trained with tokens from a single talker who produced words containing the /r/–/l/ contrast in five phonetic environments. Although subjects improved during training and showed increases in pretest–posttest performance, they failed to generalize to tokens produced by a new talker. The results of the present experiments suggest that variability plays an important role in perceptual learning and robust category formation. During training, listeners develop talker-specific, context-dependent representations for new phonetic categories by selectively shifting attention toward the contrastive dimensions of the non-native phonetic categories. Phonotactic constraints in the native language, similarity of the new contrast to distinctions in the native language, and the distinctiveness of contrastive cues all appear to mediate category acquisition.
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The feature of many different talkers assists category learning in second-language learners.
“Mothers addressing infants also increase the variety of exemplars they use, behaving in a way that makes mothers resemble many different talkers, a feature shown to assist category learning in second-language learners (107).”
From A new view of language acquisition (2000) · cites this paper as [107]
Mothers addressing infants increase the variety of exemplars they use, making mothers resemble many different talkers.
“Mothers addressing infants also increase the variety of exemplars they use, behaving in a way that makes mothers resemble many different talkers, a feature shown to assist category learning in second-language learners (107).”
From A new view of language acquisition (2000) · cites this paper as [107]
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- Authors
- Lively, S. E., Logan, J. S., & Pisoni, D. B.
- Affiliations
- Indiana University Bloomington (US)
- ORCID
- Pisoni, David B.
- Venue
- The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
- Publisher
- Acoustical Society of America (ASA)
- Published
- 1993-09-01
- Volume
- 94
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 1242-1255
- ISSN
- 0001-4966 (ISSN-L)
- 1520-8524
- PMC
- PMC3509365
- OpenAlex
- W2012658644
- Cited by
- 788
- References
- 36
- Citations by year
- 2026: 15 · 2025: 28 · 2024: 38 · 2023: 25 · 2022: 62 · 2021: 45 · 2020: 34 · 2019: 33 · 2018: 36 · 2017: 29 · 2016: 34 · 2015: 66 · 2014: 29 · 2013: 30 · 2012: 34
- FWCI
- 6.45
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health (5r01dc000111-38)
- National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD DC0012-14, R01 DC-000111, DC-00111-15, T32DC000012, F32DC000111, K08DC000111)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Phonetics and Phonology Research
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Categorization, perception, and language
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning
- Keywords
- English phonemes, Japanese listeners, second language speech perception, perceptual learning, speaker variability, phonetic environment, phonotactic constraints, category formation, phoneme identification, language transfer
- MeSH terms
- Acoustic Stimulation, Environment, Female, Humans, Japan, Learning, Male, Phonetics, Speech Acoustics, Speech Perception, Speech Production Measurement, United States
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