Does training on a phonemic contrast absent in the listener's dialect influence word recognition?

Area of Science:

• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psychoacoustics
• Speech Perception
• Second Language Acquisition

Background:

• The Standard French /e/-/epsilon/ contrast at word-final positions is absent in Southern French dialects.
• Listener's native phonological system can influence the perception and learning of non-native contrasts.
• Understanding how phonemic contrasts are learned and applied is crucial for speech perception models.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the learnability of the Standard French word-final /e/-/epsilon/ contrast by Southern French listeners.
• To assess whether explicit phonemic training transfers to implicit spoken word recognition.
• To evaluate the findings within the framework of abstractionist and exemplarist models of speech perception.

Main Methods:

• Participants underwent training associating minimal pairs differing in the /e/-/epsilon/ contrast with visual shapes.
• Performance was evaluated during the final training session.
• Transfer of learning was tested using a lexical decision task with phonological priming.

Main Results:

• Listeners achieved high performance during the final training session, indicating successful discrimination.
• Learning did not transfer to the lexical decision task, showing a lack of efficient use in word recognition.
• Explicit training on a phonemic contrast did not guarantee its functional application in spoken word recognition.

Conclusions:

• Successful explicit learning of a phonemic contrast does not automatically translate to improved implicit spoken word recognition.
• The findings suggest limitations in the direct application of learned phonemic distinctions in real-time speech processing.
• Results provide empirical data for distinguishing between abstractionist and exemplarist accounts of speech perception and learning.