Reiko AKAHANE-YAMADA, Yoh'ichi TOHKURA, Scott E. LIVELY, Ann R. BRADLOW and David B. PISONI
Effects of Extended Training on English /r/
and /l/ Identification by Native Speakers of
Japanese
Abstract:Adult foreign-language learners often have remarkable difficulty in learning the distinction of certain phonetic categories which do not occur in their native language. Recent studies have revealed that the appropriate laboratory training can improve one's perceptual ability significantly even for the most difficult categories. This paper studied effects from the amount of laboratory training by expanding the study of Lively et al. (1994). Lively and his colleagues trained native speakers of Japanese to identify American English /r/ and /l/ in 15 training sessions covering 15 days (i.e. 1 session per day). In our first experiment, we examined the effect of massed versus distributed training on the training result. Japanese speakers were trained in 15 training sessions covering 5 days (3 sessions per day). Their accuracy in an identification test improved from 70% in the pre-test to 80% in the post-test, whereas it improved from 65% to 77% in Lively et al.(1994). No siginificant difference in training effect was found in terms of the number of sessions per day between both studies. In our second experiment, Japanese speakers were trained in 45 training sessions covering 15 days. An additional 30 trials were found to significantly improve the subjects' ability to identify /r/ and /l/: The accuracy improved from 70% in the pretest to 83% after 15 sessions, and to a further 87% and 89% by 15 and 30 additional sessions, respectively. These results suggest that the amount of training compensated for the difficulty of developing proper internal representations for the new phonetic categories. Methodological implications for the training of phonetic contrasts in a second language will be discussed.