Training Japanese listeners to perceive American English vowels: influence of training sets.
OBJECTIVE
Studies on speech perception training have shown that adult 2nd language learners can learn to perceive non-native consonant contrasts through laboratory training. However, research on perception training for non-native vowels is still scarce, and none of the previous vowel studies trained more than 5 vowels. In the present study, the influence of training set sizes was investigated by training native Japanese listeners to identify American English (AE) vowels.


METHODS
Twelve Japanese learners of English were trained 9 days either on 9 AE monophthongs (fullset training group) or on the 3 more difficult vowels (subset training group). Five listeners served as controls and received no training. Performance of listeners was assessed before and after training as well as 3 months after training was completed.


RESULTS
Results indicated that (a) fullset training using 9 vowels in the stimulus set improved average identification by 25%; (b) listeners in both training groups generalized improvement to untrained words and tokens spoken by novel speakers; and (c) both groups maintained improvement after 3 months. However, the subset group never improved on untrained vowels.


CONCLUSIONS
Training protocols for learning non-native vowels should present a full set of vowels and should not focus only on the more difficult vowels.
Indiana University, USA. nishik@boystown.org
Kanae
K
Nishi
Diane
D
Kewley-Port
D000328:Adult; D044466:Asian People; D003469:Culture; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013663:Teaching / Q000379:methods*; D013997:Time Factors