Some effects of laboratory training on identification and discrimination of voicing contrasts in stop consonants.

Abstract

For many years there has been a consensus that early linguistic experience exerts a profound and often permanent effect on the perceptual abilities underlying the identification and discrimination of stop consonants. It has also been concluded that selective modification of the perception of stop consonants cannot be accomplished easily and quickly in the laboratory with simple discrimination training techniques. In the present article we report the results of three experiments that examined the perception of a three-way voicing contrast by naive monolingual speakers of English. Laboratory training procedures were implemented with a small computer in a real-time environment to examine the perception of voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated stops differing in voice onset time. Three perceptual categories were present for most subjects after only a few minutes of exposure to the novel contrast. Subsequent perceptual tests revealed reliable and consistent labeling and categorical-like discrimination functions for all three voicing categories, even though one of the contrasts is not phonologically distinctive in English. The present results demonstrate that the perceptual mechanisms used by adults in categorizing stop consonants can be modified easily with simple laboratory techniques in a short period of time.Over the last 15 years numerous studies employing synthetically produced speech stimuli have investigated voice-onset-time (VOT) perception in human adults, human infants, chinchillas, and monkeys. These developmental and cross-species comparisons have been undertaken to better understand the potential interactions between genetic predispositions and experiential factors in perceptual categorization of speech signals. The results of these diverse studies have shown the combined influence of two factors operating in speech perception. First, linguistic experience has been shown to have a substantial effect on speech perception, particularly in human adults exposed to different language-learning environments. Subjects identify and discriminate speech sounds with reference to the linguistic categories of their language. Second, basic sensory and psychophysical constraints on auditory system function seem to affect perception of speech and nonspeech control signals in similar ways. For example, the perception of voicing in stop consonants apparently requires the analysis of a temporal relation between laryngeal and supralaryngeal events. Basic constraints on auditory perception may play an important role in defining the inventory of acoustic correlates for distinctive features used in speech (Stevens, 1972). These considerations suggest that experiential and genetic factors are both implicated in the process by which speech signals are perceived by human listeners.The results of the earliest cross-language experiments on the perception and production of VOT by Abramson (1964, 1967) quantitatively confirmed that the linguistic environment exerts a profound influence on the ability to prod...

Transfer of training of a new linguistic contrast in voicing

“…The results of the present experiment extend the earlier fmdings of Pisoni et al (1982) by demonstrating a robust transfer of training effect from one synthetic stimulus continuum to another. In the Pisoni et al study, subjects were trained and tested on only a labial continuum differing in VOT.…”

“…Although the results of earlier laboratory training studies have been ambiguous, recently Pisoni, Aslin, Perey, and Hennessy (1982) have succeeded in altering the perception of labial stop consonants from a two-way contrast in voicing to a three-way contrast. The present study extended these initial results by demonstrating that experience gained from discrimination training on one place of articulation (e.g., labial) can be transferred to another place of articulation (e.g., alveolar) without any additional training on the specific test stimuli.…”

Individual differences in the acquisition of second language phonology

“…Training was discontinued either once a participant achieved criterion on this last contrast, or once they had completed a maximum of 200 trials (10 blocks), and lasted twenty to thirty minutes per stimulus type. This is a short training session compared to the amount of training that is typically administered in other phonetic training studies, where it ranges from 1 to 18 training sessions lasting up to an hour each (Carney, Widin, & Viemeister, 1977;Golestani & Zatorre, 2004;Pisoni, Aslin, Perey, & Hennessy, 1982;Strange & Dittmann, 1984).…”

Altering object representations through category learning

“…A sound difference that crosses the boundary between phonemes in a language will be more discriminable to speakers of that language than to speakers of a language in which the sound difference does not cross a phonemic boundary (Repp & Liberman, 1987). Laboratory training on the sound categories of a language can produce categorical perception among speakers of a language that does not have these categories (Pisoni, Aslin, Perey, & Hennessy, 1982).…”