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Can native Japanese listeners learn to differentiate /r–l/ on the basis of F3 onset frequency?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2011

ERIN M. INGVALSON ,
LORI L. HOLT  and
JAMES L. McCLELLAND
ERIN M. INGVALSON*
Affiliation:
Carnegie Mellon University
LORI L. HOLT
Affiliation:
Carnegie Mellon University
JAMES L. McCLELLAND
Affiliation:
Stanford University
*
Address for correspondence: Erin Ingvalson, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, 2240 Campus Dr., Evanston, IL 60208, USAingvalson@northwestern.edu
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Abstract

Many attempts have been made to teach native Japanese listeners to perceptually differentiate English /r–l/ (e.g. rock–lock). Though improvement is evident, in no case is final performance native English-like. We focused our training on the third formant onset frequency, shown to be the most reliable indicator of /r–l/ category membership. We first presented listeners with instances of synthetic /r–l/ stimuli varying only in F3 onset frequency, in a forced-choice identification training task with feedback. Evidence of learning was limited. The second experiment utilized an adaptive paradigm beginning with non-speech stimuli consisting only of /r/ and /l/ F3 frequency trajectories progressing to synthetic speech instances of /ra–la/; half of the trainees received feedback. Improvement was shown by some listeners, suggesting some enhancement of /r–l/ identification is possible following training with only F3 onset frequency. However, only a subset of these listeners showed signs of generalization of the training effect beyond the trained synthetic context.

Keywords

/r–l/second language speech perceptiontraining

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , April 2012 , pp. 255 - 274
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

*

We wish to thank Daniel Dickison for serving as translator and interpreter and Robert Kass for numerous statistical consultations, particularly the suggestion of Fisher's combined probability test. We also wish to thank several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Portions of this work were presented at the 2003 meeting of the Psychonomic Society and the 2005 meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. This work was supported by NIH grant 3R01-DC004674-06S1, NSF grant BCS-0746067, and a grant from The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation to the second author and NIMH grant P50-MH64445 to the third author.

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