Lively, S. E., Pisoni, D. B., Yamada, R. A., Tohkura, Y., & Yamada, T. (1994). Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/. III. Long-term retention of new phonetic categories. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 96 (4), 2076–2087.
Presentation: Sally
Summary: Sarah
Previous studies have discovered that Japanese speakers improved significantly on the identification of English /r/ and /l/ after three-week training of using the high-variability paradigm. The current study is a replication of previous ones, but is expanded into a longitudinal study. In particular, it aims to see whether the improvements shown immediately after the training could be retained afterwards. Nineteen monolingual Japanese subjects were recruited for the experiment. The pretest-posttest procedure was adopted, with a three-week training period inserted inbetween. Subjects came back three months and six months later and redid the posttest session. No training was given during these six months. Results for the first posttest basically replicated previous studies. After three months without training, subjects still showed high accuracy for /r/ and /l/ identification. Six months later, the overall accuracy decreased, but it was still higher than the pretest accuracy. This study proved that through training, listeners would learn to pay attention to the right cues for distinguishing foreign sounds. More crucially, by constantly tracing subjects’ performance, it further showed that high-variability paradigm is an effective method, in which the improvements could be retained for a period of time after training completed.
Presentation: Sally
Summary: Sarah
Previous studies have discovered that Japanese speakers improved significantly on the identification of English /r/ and /l/ after three-week training of using the high-variability paradigm. The current study is a replication of previous ones, but is expanded into a longitudinal study. In particular, it aims to see whether the improvements shown immediately after the training could be retained afterwards. Nineteen monolingual Japanese subjects were recruited for the experiment. The pretest-posttest procedure was adopted, with a three-week training period inserted inbetween. Subjects came back three months and six months later and redid the posttest session. No training was given during these six months. Results for the first posttest basically replicated previous studies. After three months without training, subjects still showed high accuracy for /r/ and /l/ identification. Six months later, the overall accuracy decreased, but it was still higher than the pretest accuracy. This study proved that through training, listeners would learn to pay attention to the right cues for distinguishing foreign sounds. More crucially, by constantly tracing subjects’ performance, it further showed that high-variability paradigm is an effective method, in which the improvements could be retained for a period of time after training completed.
