2009/04/30

Bradlow, A. R., Pisoni, D. B., Akahane-Yamada, R., & Tohkura, Y. (1997). Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: IV. Some effects of perceptual learning on speech production. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 101(4), 2299–2310.

Presentation: Sally

Summary: Angela

In this study, Japanese native speakers were trained perceptually to see whether they could improve in distinguishing /r/ and /l/ in both perception and production. A perception test was conducted before and after the training. A comparison between that of the trained and control groups showed that Japanese native speakers could improve in perception of /r/ and /l/ after training. Also, the improvement was more significant in terms of /l/ than /r/. To test whether there was also improvement in their production, these Japanese native speakers were also recorded of their own production of /r/ and /l/ before and after the training so that their production could be judged by native English speakers. Two types of judgment tests were carried out. One was a direct rating of the pre- and post- test items and the other was an identification task where native English speakers had to choose from one of the two minimal pairs produced by the Japanese speakers. The results of both tasks indicated an improvement in Japanese native speakers’ production. Therefore, it was concluded in this study that training is effective in for the improvement of novel speech sounds in L2.