Hazan, V., Sennema, A., Iba, M., & Faulkner, A. (2005). Effect of audiovisual perceptual training on the perception and production of consonants in Japanese learners of English. Speech Communication, 47(3), 360–378.
Presentation: Belinda
Summary: Thomas
This study examines the effect of audiovisual perceptual training, as compared with using auditory stimuli alone, on Japanese learner’s perception and production of English consonants. Three experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 focused on the effect of audiovisual and auditory training on the perception of labial and labiodentals sounds, namely, /b/, /p/, and /v/. Results showed that learners who were trained by audiovisual stimuli had more improvement on the perception of the labial-labiodental contrast than those trained by auditory material alone. Also, learners trained by auditory materials showed improvement on their sensitivity only on auditory cues, whereas learner trained by audiovisual stimuli improved their sensitivity on both auditory and visual cues. Experiment 2 was done to see whether audiovisual training could also improve the perception of a less visually distinctive pair of sounds (/r/ and /l/). A set of audio-visual synthetic stimuli (auditory stimuli with a synthetic face) was added to this experiment. Results showed that there was no significant difference in the improvement among learners receiving different types of training. An additional generalization test was done to evaluate whether the learners could generalize the effect of training to new materials. The results of this additional test also showed that different training modes had no significant effect. Experiment 3 was a perceptual analysis on the realization of /r/-/l/ in the speech recorded by the participants of the experiments, before and after training. The data showed that speakers who received natural audiovisual training (auditory stimuli with a natural face) had the greatest improvement in producing the /r/-/l/ contrast. These results suggested that sensitivity on visual cues can be trained and the perception of L2 sounds can thus be improved. However, the effect depends much on whether the target sounds have visual distinctiveness. As for the effect of audiovisual training on production of L2 sounds, it is found that auditory material accompanied by natural visual stimuli could best improve the realization of consonants in learners’ speech.
