The effects of experimental variables on the perception of American English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese listeners

Yamada, Reiko; Tohkura, Yoh’ichi

doi:10.3758/bf03206698

Cited by 94 publications

(72 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…-s-Accepted by previous editor, Myron L. Braunstein contrast was selected as a test case for assessing novel approaches to non-native speech contrast training because of its extreme difficulty for Japanese speakers (Goto, 1971;MacKain, Best, & Strange, 1981;Miyawaki et aI., 1975;Mochizuki, 1981;Sheldon & Strange, 1982;Yamada & Tohkura, 1992), and because it had been shown in previous studies to be resistant to modification after discrimination training with synthetic consonant-vowel stimuli (see Strange & Dittmann, 1984).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/and /l/: Long-term retention of learning in perception and production

Bradlow¹,

Akahane‐Yamada

Pisoni

et al. 1999

Perception & Psychophysics

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348

264

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Previous work from our laboratories has shown that monolingual Japanese adults who were given intensive high-variability perceptual training improved in both perception and production of English Iri-ill minimal pairs. In this study, we extended those findings by investigating the long-term retention of learning in both perception and production of this difficult non-native contrast. Results showed that 3 months after completion of the perceptual training procedure, the Japanese trainees maintained their improved levels of performance on the perceptual identification task. Furthermore, perceptual evaluations by native American English listeners of the Japanese trainees' pretest, posttest, and 3-month follow-up speech productions showed that the trainees retained their long-term improvements in the general quality, identifiability, and overall intelligibility of their English 1r1-11/ word productions. Taken together, the results provide further support for the efficacy of high-variability laboratory speech sound training procedures, and suggest an optimistic outlook for the application of such procedures for a wide range of "special populations."Over the past decade, several important advances have been made toward establishing effective laboratory training procedures for modifying the identification of difficult non-native phonetic categories (for recent reviews, see

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/and /l/: Long-term retention of learning in perception and production

Bradlow¹,

Akahane‐Yamada

Pisoni

et al. 1999

Perception & Psychophysics

Self Cite

348

264

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This suggests that talkers may give differential emphasis to the multiple cues to /r/ and /l/ (although acoustic correlates to the perceptual differences have not been previously reported), and that Japanese listeners have not experienced a sufficient sampling of the range of cues to /r/ and /l/ that occur across different talkers to be able to normalize for this kind of variability. Considering talker differences in cues as adding to the range of cues suggests a connection to previous work by Yamada and Tohkura [5,6].…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 58%

“…In the experiments, we considered the question of whether Japanese listeners are able to adapt to talker-specific differences in cues to /r/ and /l/, or if added variability due to talker differences instead influences sessionspecific criteria, as did the "range" manipulations in [6].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We must note that we cannot determine whether subjects ever used F3 in our experiments: because of the division between /r/ and /l/ stimuli in F3, high accuracy will always be correlated with F3, even if subjects are relying on another cue we have not identified (but see Yamada and Tohkura [6], who were able to analyze sensitivity to F3 by systematically changing it in synthetic stimuli).…”

Section: Acoustic Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Acoustic correlates to the effects of talker variability on the perception of English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese listeners

Magnuson

Akahane‐Yamada

Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP '96

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It is often reported that for non-native listeners of a language, some native speakers' productions of non-native contrasts are easier to understand than others' (e.g., [1]). However, these effects are not well-understood, as acoustic correlates to the effects have proven difficult to establish. We report analyses of subject differences and acoustic measurements which may help to describe the acoustic phenomena underlying one class of talker effects that we have reported previously; specifically, the interaction of talker and talker condition (the number of talkers heard within a block of trials --one or several) [2]. Correlations between response measures and acoustic measures suggest that when stimuli from several talkers are mixed randomly in a block of trials, subjects without well-formed categories for /r/ and /l/ attempt to use the duration of the initial steady-state portion of an /r/ or /l/ stimulus (an unreliable cue) for categorization, whereas native speakers use F3 [6]. It also appears that they use this cue to establish criteria for "R"-"L" decisions, which they apply to the overall range of durations across all talkers in one block of trials.

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“…For SC interactions, the illustrious English contrast [i]: [1], in which both phones correspond nearly equally well/poorly to the single Japanese /t/ category, has been examined by copious studies (to name only a few recent examples, Aoyama, Flege, Guion, Akahane -Yamada, & Yamada, 2004;Best & Strange, 1992;Logan, Lively, & Pisoni, 1991;McCandliss, Fiez, Protopapas, Conway, & McClelland, 2002;Yamada & Tohkura, 1992). Somewhat less famously, the CG pattern can be typified by the French and German [u]: [y] contrast with English /u/ (see, e.g., Flege & Hillenbrand, 1984;Gottfried, 1984;Polka, 1995;Rochet, 1995), in which the phone [u] manifests much greater (although not perfect) category goodness to English /u/ over the phonetically similar [y].…”

Section: Background and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

CVC syllables for investigating the phonetic sensitivity of Mandarin and English speakers

Munro

2008

Behav Res

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Although many individual speech contrasts pairs have been studied within the cross-language literature, no one has created a comprehensive and systematic set of such stimuli. This article justifies and details an extensive set of contrast pairs for Mandarin Chinese and American English. The stimuli consist of 180 pairs of CVC syllables recorded in two tokens each (720 syllables total). Between each CVC pair, two of the segments are identical, whereas the third differs in that a segment drawn from a "native" phonetic category (either Mandarin, English, or both) is partnered with a segment drawn from a "foreign" phonetic category (nonnative to Mandarin, English, or both). Each contrast pair differs by a minimal phonetic amount and constitutes a meaningful contrast among the world's languages (as cataloged in the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database of 451 languages). The entire collection of phonetic differences envelops Mandarin and English phonetic spaces and generates a range of phonetic discriminability. Contrastive segments are balanced through all possible syllable positions, with noncontrastive segments being filled in with other "foreign" segments. Although intended to measure phonetic perceptual sensitivity among adult speakers of the two languages, these stimuli are offered here to all for similar or for altogether unrelated investigations.In an ongoing series of investigations into individual differences in second language acquisition of speech sounds, I have developed a set stimuli used to test listener aptitude for detecting small phonetic differences within their first language (L1) and second language (L2) categories. Tasks measuring differential listener sensitivity are compared with measures of idiosyncratic productive accent, in an attempt t? identify one or more cognitive correlate(s) of spoken accent. The stimulus set, composed entirely of CVC syllables, was designed to assess L2 speakers of American English with Mandarin Chinese as their L 1 . The segments that compose each CVC are compiled from speech contrasts that are nonnative to the phonetic categories of these two languages and that mark meaningful distinctions among a substantial fraction of the world's languages, as cataloged within the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database of 451 languages (UPSID451; Maddieson & Precoda, 1990). The location of the paired contrasting segment is rotated through syllable positions; the corpus of 180 pairs, with two tokens recorded for each (a total of 720 CVCs), is subdivided by target language(s). The impetus for this publication is to substantiate these stimuli and to make them available with the prospect of life in other investigations. Thus, first, the motivation for these stimuli will be provided, along with a discussion of their rationalization based on the current related L2 speech framework. This is then followed by a description of the CVC pairs, including how they were generated. Finally, this article concludes with a series of suggestions of other ways that these stimuli might b...

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The effects of experimental variables on the perception of American English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese listeners

Cited by 94 publications

References 29 publications

Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/and /l/: Long-term retention of learning in perception and production

Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/and /l/: Long-term retention of learning in perception and production

Acoustic correlates to the effects of talker variability on the perception of English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese listeners

CVC syllables for investigating the phonetic sensitivity of Mandarin and English speakers

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