2009/11/25

Wayland, R.P. & Li, B. (2008). Effects of two training procedures in cross-language perception of tones. Journal of Phonetics, 36(2), 250–267.

Presentation: Chris

Summary: Sarah

Although non-native phonological contrasts are generally not discernable to native listeners, it has been indicated by various studies that under experimental settings, listeners could still be trained to make a distinction on non-native contrasts. This study aims to investigate how different training procedures affect listeners’ improvements on their perception of non-native phonological categories. Specifically, Chinese and English native speakers were tested on their perception of the mid and low tones in Thai. Two aspects of the training procedure are considered, including training tasks (identification/discrimination) and inter-stimulus interval (short/long). The perception experiment adopted the pre-test/post-test paradigm, with different training tasks embedded in-between. Both pre-test and post-test included short and long ISI trials. Results showed that the two training tasks are equally effective in increasing perceptual accuracy. As for the effect of ISI, Chinese listeners performed better when the ISI was long; for English listeners, on the other hand, no ISI effects were reported. It was suspected that longer ISI would enable Chinese speakers to activate the tonal categories in their native languages, and such an association facilitates their identification of non-native tones. Finally, Chinese listeners in general performed much better than English listeners in distinguishing Thai tones. This finding therefore indicated that listeners’ native language background would also have an effect on their perception of non-native phonological contrasts.