Effects of Ultrasound Familiarization on Production and Perception of Nonnative Contrasts

We investigated the efficacy of ultrasound imaging of the tongue as a tool for familiarizing naïve learners with the production of a class of nonnative speech sounds: palatalized Russian consonants.

Two learner groups were familiarized, one with ultrasound and one with audio only. Learners performed pre- and postfamiliarization production and discrimination tasks.

Ratings of productions of word-final palatalized consonants by learners from both groups improved after familiarization, as did discrimination of the palatalization contrast word-finally. There were no significant differences in the improvement between groups in either task. All learners were able to generalize to novel contexts in production and discrimination. The presence of palatalization interfered with discrimination of word-initial manner, and ultrasound learners were more successful in overcoming that interference.

Ultrasound familiarization resulted in improvements in production and discrimination comparable to audio only. Ultrasound familiarization additionally helped learners overcome difficulties in manner discrimination introduced by palatalization. When familiarizing learners with a novel, nonnative class of sounds, a small set of stimuli in different contexts may be more beneficial than using a larger set in one context. Although untrained production can disrupt discrimination training, we found that production familiarization was not disruptive to discrimination or production.