(Dis)Connecting perception and production: Training native speakers of Spanish on the English /i/-/ɪ/ distinction
Creator
Sakai, Mari
Advisor
Ortega, Lourdes
Abstract
This dissertation features three experiments that investigated how perception and production are connected in the acquisition of second language (L2) phones by comparing the effectiveness of two modality-specific trainings and their respective potential for cross-modality gains. Participants were native speakers of Spanish with advanced English proficiency, and the targets were the English vowels /i/ and /ɪ/.
In Experiment 1, participants (n=15) received perception-only training; they heard auditory exemplars of the target phonemes but never produced the sounds. In Experiment 2, two variations of a production-only training were compared that either allowed or denied access to the auditory feedback loop. A first group (n=14) underwent training using a computer program that provided real-time visual representations of spoken vowels. They never heard any other-produced auditory tokens of the target sounds, although they could hear the sound of their own voices. A second group (n=15) underwent the same training, but wore noise-cancelling headphones and listened to white noise. This ensured that they never heard other- or self-generated tokens of the target phonemes, for the first time in the literature truly isolating production from all auditory influence. All participants in both experiments completed a battery of pre- and posttests in perception and production, and they were also compared against a control group (n=15) and two baselines: a group of native speakers of English (n=20), and a bilingual group (n=16) who was deemed to have acquired /i/ and /ɪ/. In Experiment 3, the two baselines were directly compared in order to test their efficacy as benchmarks for phonetic training experiments.
Results revealed that: (1) perception-only training led to large gains in perception and no sizeable improvements in production; (2) production-only training led to variable results for production, and medium-sized improvements in perception; (3) access to the auditory feedback loop provided a benefit to production; (4) access to or denial of the auditory feedback loop did not affect cross-modal learning in perception; and (5) bilinguals are a fitting, and for many purposes likely sufficient, comparison baseline group in L2 speech training experiments.
The dissertation contributes novel theoretical, methodological, and educational insights to the L2 speech training literature.
Description
Ph.D.
Permanent Link
http://hdl.handle.net/10822/1042879Date Published
2016Subject
Type
Publisher
Georgetown University
Extent
223 leaves
Collections
Metadata
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