The roles of task, segment type, and attention in L2 perceptual training

Abstract

Previous studies show that attention plays an important role in second language (L2) phonetic attainment. This study compares the effect of two high variability phonetic training methods (identification (ID) and categorical AX discrimination (DIS)) on specifically targeted sounds and on implicitly exposed but untargeted sounds. Four groups of Spanish/Catalan bilingual learners of English were trained on either a subset of English vowels (/iː ɪ æ ʌ ɜː/) or word-initial and word-final stops. The study also examined if the potential effect of training generalized to new stimuli and persisted two months after training. Results revealed that trainees significantly outperformed the controls in their identification of targeted sounds, and improvement generalized to new stimuli and was maintained after training, showing the efficacy of both training methodologies. However, while all trainees performed similarly with initial stops, ID trainees outperformed DIS trainees in vowel perception. Interestingly, only DIS trainees showed a significant improvement in the perception of untargeted sounds, indicating that this training method (possibly due to the absence of labels and the exposure to two physically present stimuli in each trial) may be more suited to enhance learners’ perception of both targeted and untargeted sounds.

A system for high-variability training of French vowels: A design-based study

“…The variety of speakers and contexts allow for plenty of phonetic examples for listeners to learn from, thus strengthening their new conceptual sound category. The effectiveness of HVPT seems to be due to its potential to promote the acquisition of robust phonemic categories by the learner (Lambacher et al, 2005;Lively et al, 1994;Wang et al, 2003;Wang & Munro, 2004;Wang et al, 1999) and their generalization to new (untrained) phonetic contexts and speaker voices (Bradlow et al, 1997;Bradlow et al, 1999;Bradlow, 2008;Carlet & Cebrian, 2014;Iverson et al, 2005). Originally used to research second language phonemic categories, this type of training also has seen growing use in language learning (Barriuso & Hayes-Harb, 2018;Thomson, 2018).…”