Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: A first report

1991/02/01 by John S. Logan, Scott E. Lively, David B. Pisoni · 911 citations
Psychology · Computer Science · #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #Speech and Audio Processing #Stimulus (psychology) #Psychology #Contrast (vision) #First language #Audiology #Cognitive psychology #Speech recognition #Linguistics #Computer science #Artificial intelligence

paper · doi:10.1121/1.1894649

published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 89(2), 874-886 (Acoustical Society of America)

openalex publication_date 1991/02/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

Native speakers of Japanese learning English generally have difficulty differentiating the phonemes /r/ and /l/, even after years of experience with English. Previous research that attempted to train Japanese listeners to distinguish this contrast using synthetic stimuli reported little success, especially when transfer to natural tokens containing /r/ and /l/ was tested. In the present study, a different training procedure that emphasized variability among stimulus tokens was used. Japanese subjects were trained in a minimal pair identification paradigm using multiple natural exemplars contrasting /r/ and /l/ from a variety of phonetic environments as stimuli. A pretest-posttest design containing natural tokens was used to assess the effects of training. Results from six subjects showed that the new procedure was more robust than earlier training techniques. Small but reliable differences in performance were obtained between pretest and posttest scores. The results demonstrate the importance of stimulus variability and task-related factors in training nonnative speakers to perceive novel phonetic contrasts that are not distinctive in their native language.

Citations

• Effects of discrimination training on the perception of /r-l/ by Japanese adults learning English
• Auditory perception by normal Japanese adults of the sounds “L” and “R”
• Cross-language evidence for three factors in speech perception
• Crosslanguage Study of Vowel Perception
• The discrimination of speech sounds within and across phoneme boundaries.
• Auditory and phonetic memory codes in the discrimination of consonants and vowels

Cited by

• Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: IV. Some effects of perceptual learning on speech production
• Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/. II: The role of phonetic environment and talker variability in learning new perceptual categories
• Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/. III. Long-term retention of new phonetic categories
• An investigation of current models of second language speech perception: The case of Japanese adults’ perception of English consonants
• Lexical familiarity and English-language experience affect Japanese adults’ perception of /ɹ/ and /l/
• The effects of experimental variables on the perception of American English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese listeners
• Perception of English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese speakers [wikipedia]