Logan, J. S., Lively, S. E., & Pisoni, D. B. (1991). Training Japanese listeners to identify English r and l: A first report. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 89(2), 874–886.
Presentation: Sally
Summary: Angela
This is one of the first studies that made an attempt to study Japanese speakers’ perception of English r and l in various phonetic contexts, by various talkers, and with natural stimuli. Japanese subjects in this study underwent one to two pretests to see if there was a pretest practicing effect. They received training afterwards, in which the material included 136 words, placed in five environments, and read by five talkers. A post test was then conducted on the subjects to see how well they learned. Another two generalization tests were also carried out to see if subjects could generalize what they learned during training to new talkers and words. The results showed that there was no effect of the number of times subjects took the pretest. On the other hand, subjects did improve in their performance during the posttest session, especially in the initial clustering and intervocalic environments. A talker effect was also presented. In particular, Talkers 4 and 5 were better identified. Finally, in terms of the generalization tests, it was found that subjects did a better job in identifying new words read by old speakers than by new ones. The results indicate that Japanese subjects could indeed improve in their perception of r and l solely by giving them training. Talkers and phonetic environments were factors that influenced Japanese speakers’ perception of r and l. The implication of this study is that researchers need to be aware of these factors in the study of Japanese speakers’ perception of r and l to gain further insight to this issue.
