The creation of a new vowel category by adult learners after adaptive phonetic training

The Role of Temporal Acoustic Exaggeration in High Variability Phonetic Training: A Behavioral and ERP Study

“…In particular, the literature has well documented that to distinguish the /i/-/ i / contrast, native English speakers rely predominantly on the spectral cues (Mermelstein, 1978; Hillenbrand et al, 2000). In contrast, L2 learners of English, Chinese included, tend to make their judgment based on duration cues (Grenon et al, 2019). Therefore, although the two trained groups showed significant improvement in natural word identification, it is hard to determine whether these trainees learned to use primary spectral cues to identify the target vowels without looking at the evidence from the identification and discrimination data from the duration-controlled synthetic stimuli.…”

“…This improvement can generalize to new contexts and talkers, and transfer to production (Logan et al, 1991; Lively et al, 1993; Strange, 1995; Bradlow and Pisoni, 1997; Wang et al, 1999; Iverson et al, 2005; Sadakata and Mcqueen, 2013). However, not all L2 learners appear to benefit from HVPT; the effectiveness is limited by learners’ perceptual abilities, first language (L1) background, and the nature of speech categories to be learned (Iverson and Evans, 2009; Perrachione et al, 2011; Sadakata and Mcqueen, 2014; Grenon et al, 2019). Although earlier studies showed the efficacy of HVPT only with the identification training protocol, a recent study demonstrated the feasibility of both identification and discrimination training with similar improvements (Shinohara and Iverson, 2018).…”

“…Although earlier studies showed the efficacy of HVPT only with the identification training protocol, a recent study demonstrated the feasibility of both identification and discrimination training with similar improvements (Shinohara and Iverson, 2018). Some studies further indicated the benefits of combining systematic temporal/spectral exaggeration with adaptive training in the HVPT paradigm (Zhang et al, 2000, 2009; Grenon et al, 2019) while achieving limited success in overcoming the native language interference. But the effects of this modified and integrated HVPT approach have not been directly compared with those without introducing the temporal acoustic exaggeration.…”

“…Empirical research evidenced this difficulty. Native English speakers can use both duration and formant frequency cues for distinguishing the two sounds (Mermelstein, 1978; Whalen, 1989; Grenon et al, 2019), and they predominantly rely on the spectral cues (Mermelstein, 1978; Hillenbrand et al, 2000). On the contrary, at least at the initial learning stage, English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners rely dominantly on duration cues rather than spectral cues in both perception and production (Escudero and Boersma, 2004; Morrison, 2005; Wang and Heuven, 2006; Yang, 2011; Liu et al, 2014).…”

“…Giannakopoulou et al (2013) replicated the effects with training native Greek ESL learners to distinguish the same contrast. However, previous research has highlighted the limiting role of the L1 background, indicating the necessity to test the efficacy of HVPT for L2 learners with different L1s (Iverson and Evans, 2009; Grenon et al, 2019). In addition, previous studies have established the positive effects of talker variability in facilitating second language phonetic learning (e.g., Logan et al, 1991; Hardison, 2003; Zhang et al, 2009).…”