Individual Differences in Phonetic Plasticity Across Native and Nonnative Contexts.

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Auditory Perception

Background:

• Individual variability exists in both nonnative phonetic learning and native language phonetic adaptation.
• Difficulties in these areas are noted in speech and language disorders, but also present in typical populations.
• The concept of 'phonetic plasticity' is proposed to explain this shared capacity.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if individual differences in native and nonnative phonetic learning can be explained by a common underlying ability.
• To examine the relationship between phonetic learning abilities and other cognitive functions.

Main Methods:

• 80 healthy young adults completed 11 cognitive tasks across two sessions.
• Tasks included nonnative phonetic category learning and adapting to native language variations.
• Exploratory factor analysis was used to assess task interrelationships.

Main Results:

• Performance on native learning tasks and an explicit nonnative learning task correlated significantly.
• This suggests a shared capacity, termed 'phonetic plasticity,' underlies both.
• Phonetic plasticity was associated with vocabulary and speech comprehension in noise.

Conclusions:

• Nonnative sound learning and native language speech perception may depend on a shared 'phonetic plasticity'.
• Individuals adept at learning native language phonetic variations are likely proficient learners of nonnative phonetic contrasts.
• Phonetic plasticity is a key factor in both native and nonnative speech sound acquisition.