title: Learning a novel phonological contrast depends on interactions between individual differences and training paradigm design.
abstract: Studies evaluating phonological contrast learning typically investigate either the predictiveness of specific pretraining aptitude measures or the efficacy of different instructional paradigms. However, little research considers how these factors interact--whether different students learn better from different types of instruction--and what the psychological basis for any interaction might be. The present study demonstrates that successfully learning a foreign-language phonological contrast for pitch depends on an interaction between individual differences in perceptual abilities and the design of the training paradigm. Training from stimuli with high acoustic-phonetic variability is generally thought to improve learning; however, we found high-variability training enhanced learning only for individuals with strong perceptual abilities. Learners with weaker perceptual abilities were actually impaired by high-variability training relative to a low-variability condition. A second experiment assessing variations on the high-variability training design determined that the property of this learning environment most detrimental to perceptually weak learners is the amount of trial-by-trial variability. Learners' perceptual limitations can thus override the benefits of high-variability training where trial-by-trial variability in other irrelevant acoustic-phonetic features obfuscates access to the target feature. These results demonstrate the importance of considering individual differences in pretraining aptitudes when evaluating the efficacy of any speech training paradigm.
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
authors.forename: Tyler K
authors.initials: TK
authors.lastname: Perrachione
authors.forename: Jiyeon
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Louisa Y Y
authors.initials: LY
authors.lastname: Ha
authors.forename: Patrick C M
authors.initials: PC
authors.lastname: Wong
mesh_terms: D000124:Achievement; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001076:Aptitude; D003071:Cognition; D005793:Generalization, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007858:Learning; D010700:Phonetics; D010898:Pitch Perception; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013997:Time Factors