Abstract:
Previous work from these laboratories has shown that monolingual Japanese adults who were subjected to intensive perceptual identification training improved in both perception and production of English /r/-/l/ minimal pairs. The present study expanded on this finding by comparing the results from three different perceptual analysis procedures. The initial test was a direct comparison by American English listeners of the Japanese trainees' pre-test and post-test utterances. This test assessed the extent to which AE listeners could discriminate pre-test and post-test productions. The second test used a two-alternative forced-choice identification paradigm to assess the intelligibility of the pre-test and post-test /r/--/l/ words. The final test employed an open-set transcription task in which the AE listeners simply transcribed the Japanese productions. Each of these perceptual analysis tests submitted the Japanese productions to increasingly stringent judgment criteria, and thus provided different information about the nature of the production improvement that results from perception training. The long-term effects of this learning was also examined by retesting the Japanese trainees' production abilities 3 and 6 months after perceptual training was completed. [Work supported, in part, by NIH Grant Nos. DC-00012 and DC-00111 to Indiana Univ., Bloomington.]