Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/. II: The role of phonetic environment and talker variability in learning new perceptual categories

1993/09/01 by Scott E. Lively, John S. Logan, David B. Pisoni · 788 citations
Psychology · #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Language Development and Disorders #Multisensory perception and integration #Phonotactics #Optimal distinctiveness theory #Psychology #Contrast (vision) #Perception #Context (archaeology) #Linguistics #Consonant #Speech recognition #Cognitive psychology #Phonology #Computer science #Artificial intelligence #Vowel #Social psychology

paper · open access · doi:10.1121/1.408177

published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 94(3), 1242-1255 (Acoustical Society of America)

openalex publication_date 1993/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

Two experiments were carried out to extend Logan et al.'s recent study [J. S. Logan, S. E. Lively, and D. B. Pisoni, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 89, 874-886 (1991)] on training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/. Subjects in experiment 1 were trained in an identification task with multiple talkers who produced English words containing the /r/-/l/ contrast in initial singleton, initial consonant clusters, and intervocalic positions. Moderate, but significant, increases in accuracy and decreases in response latency were observed between pretest and posttest and during training sessions. Subjects also generalized to new words produced by a familiar talker and novel words produced by an unfamiliar talker. In experiment 2, a new group of subjects was trained with tokens from a single talker who produced words containing the /r/-/l/ contrast in five phonetic environments. Although subjects improved during training and showed increases in pretest-posttest performance, they failed to generalize to tokens produced by a new talker. The results of the present experiments suggest that variability plays an important role in perceptual learning and robust category formation. During training, listeners develop talker-specific, context-dependent representations for new phonetic categories by selectively shifting attention toward the contrastive dimensions of the non-native phonetic categories. Phonotactic constraints in the native language, similarity of the new contrast to distinctions in the native language, and the distinctiveness of contrastive cues all appear to mediate category acquisition.

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
• Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: A first report
• Characterizing the influence of native language experience on adult speech perception
• Reaction times to comparisons within and across phonetic categories
• Auditory and phonetic memory codes in the discrimination of consonants and vowels
• Human adults and human infants show a “perceptual magnet effect” for the prototypes of speech categories, monkeys do not

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/. 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/
• Perception of English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese speakers [wikipedia]