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Learning foreign vowels.

John Kingston1

  • 1Linguistics Department, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 01003-9274, USA. jkingston@linguist.umass.edu

Language and Speech
|January 30, 2004
PubMed
Summary

Listeners can learn foreign language sounds, but how they learn them is complex. This study suggests that learning abstract features, like vowel properties, is possible, even when sounds vary.

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Area of Science:

  • Phonetics and Speech Science
  • Second Language Acquisition
  • Cognitive Psychology

Background:

  • Listeners' ability to distinguish foreign language sounds is crucial for second language acquisition.
  • Existing models, like the Perceptual Assimilation Model and Speech Learning Model, predict learning ease based on native phoneme assimilation.
  • An alternative view suggests training leads to learning exemplars rather than abstract features.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To test hypotheses about how listeners learn foreign language speech sound contrasts.
  • To investigate whether listeners learn abstract features or specific exemplars.
  • To determine the learnability of natural classes defined by distinctive feature values.

Main Methods:

  • American English listeners were trained to categorize German nonlow vowels.
  • Three sets of experiments were conducted to test different hypotheses.
  • Discrimination tasks and categorization learning were employed.

Main Results:

  • Some vowel contrasts were easier to discriminate than others, challenging existing models.
  • Contextual and speaker variation affected learning of [tense] but not [high] contrasts.
  • Listeners learned some abstract features (e.g., [+/- high], [+/- back]) but showed mixed results for [+/- tense].

Conclusions:

  • The findings challenge predictions of assimilation-based models and support an exemplar-based interpretation in some aspects.
  • Listeners can learn abstract features defining natural classes of speech sounds, even with phonetic variability.
  • The study highlights the complexity of foreign sound learning, involving both feature and exemplar-based processes.

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