To test the effect of linguistic experience on the perception of a cue that is known to be effective in distinguishing between [1') and [I) in English, 21 Japanese and 39 American adults were tested on discrimination of a set of synthetic speech-like stimuli. The 13 "speech" stimuli in this set varied in the initial stationary frequency of the third formant (F3) and its subsequent transition into the vowel over a range sufficient to produce the perception of [1' a) and [I a) for American subjects and to produce [1' a) (which is not in phonemic contrast to [I a)) for Japanese subjects. Discrimination tests of a comparable set of stimuli consisting of the isolated F3 components provided a "nonspeech" control. For Americans, the discrimination of the speech stimuli was nearly categorical, i.e., comparison pairs which were identified as different phonemes were discriminated with high accuracy, while pairs which were identified as the same phoneme were discriminated relatively poorly. In comparison, discrimination of speech stimuli by Japanese subjects was only slightly better than chance for all comparison pairs. Performance on nonspeech stimuli, however, was virtually identical for Japanese and American subjects; both groups showed highly accurate discrimination of all comparison pairs. These results suggest that the effect of linguistic experience is specific to perception in the "speech mode." One way to examine the effect of linguistic experience on the perception of speech is to compare the discrimination of phonetic segments by two groups of speakers: one group speaks a language in

This study examines the relationship between the production and perception of English /r/ and /l/ by native Japanese adults learning English in the United States. For some subjects, production of the contrast was more accurate than their perception of it, replicating and extending a previous finding reported by Goto (1971) in Japan. The difficulty in perception of the liquid contrast varied with its position in the word. Prevocalic /r/ and /l/ in consonant clusters yielded the greatest perceptual errors, while word-final liquids were accurately perceived. This pattern of errors is not predictable on the basis of contrastive phonological analysis, but might be the result of acoustic-phonetic factors. Implications for second language pedagogy are discussed.

Categorical perception of a synthetic / r / -/ l / continuum was investigated with Japanese bilinguals at two levels of English language experience. The inexperienced Japanese group, referred to as Not-experienced, had had little or no previous training in English conversation. The Experienced Japanese group had had intensive training in English conversation by native American-English speakers. The tasks used were absolute identification, AXB discrimination, and oddity discrimination. Results showed classic categorical perception by an American-English control group. The Not-experienced Japanese showed near-chance performance on all tasks, with performance no better for stimuli that straddled the / r / -/ l / boundary than for stimuli that fell in either category. The Experienced Japanese group, however, perceived / r / and / I / categorically. Their identification performance did not differ from the American-English controls, but their overall performance levels on the discrimination tests were somewhat lower than for the Americans. We conclude that native Japanese adults learning English as a second language are capable of categorical perception of / r / and / I / . Implications for perceptual training of phonemic contrasts are discussed. » 1981 Cambridge University Press

and SIBYLLA DITTMANN University ofMinnesota, Minneapolis, MinnesotaNative Japanese speakers learning English have difficulty perceptually differentiating the liquid consonants Irl and Ill, even after extensive conversational instruction. Using a samedifferent 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 initiallrl and Ill. 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. 131In the phonological system of a particular language, only a subset of all possible phonetic contrasts are utilized to differentiate lexical items. Different languages utilize different subsets of phonetic contrasts; thus, the patterns of speech production and perception for a speaker-hearer are constrained by the phonological system of his or her native language. It has long been known that, for adults, learning a new pattern of speech production in a foreign language is problematic. The persistence of a foreign accent includes, among other things, a failure to produce phonetic contrasts appropriately in the new language, contrasts that are not

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