Nonnative implicit phonetic training in multiple reverberant environments.

Area of Science:

• Auditory perception
• Phonetics
• Cognitive psychology

Background:

• Speech intelligibility is reduced by reverberation, especially for foreign language learners.
• The impact of room acoustics on phonetic learning is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how room reverberation affects the acquisition of new phonetic categories during implicit training.
• To determine if training in varied acoustic environments enhances phonetic learning compared to single environments.

Main Methods:

• Implicit phonetic learning was trained using a videogame in virtual environments (anechoic, reverberant, or multiple).
• Participants learned to distinguish a nonnative dental-retroflex contrast via task-irrelevant perceptual learning.
• Pre- and post-training tests assessed generalization across tokens, speakers, and rooms.

Main Results:

• Training in multiple rooms induced significant phonetic learning, unlike training in a single room.
• Learning generalized to new rooms and speech tokens but not to new voices.
• Implicit training in diverse acoustic settings improved, rather than hindered, phonetic acquisition.

Conclusions:

• Exposure to varied acoustic environments during implicit training enhances nonnative phonetic learning.
• Learners can overcome reverberation's detrimental effects with appropriate training.
• Multi-room training is more effective for acquiring novel phonetic categories than single-room training.