4/19/2023 0 Comments Psyscope message board![]() ![]() L2 learners may, under certain learning circumstances, develop L2 phonological categories that correspond to similar sets of phonetic properties. The purpose of this paper is to propose a learning scenario that may account for these observations. If this is the case, it remains to be explained how they might have learned a phonological distinction without being able to discriminate it to the same level as a native speaker. To establish separate lexical entries for /r/–/l/ minimal pairs (e.g., rock and lock), it could be argued that they must have developed separate phonological categories for /r/ and /l/. The fact that learners were able to identify words according to whether they contained /r/ or /l/ suggests that they had some sensitivity to the phonetic characteristics that define English /r/ versus /l/. However, in spite of the improvements from high variability training, the learners’ performance did not reach the same level of accuracy as that of native speakers of English. The results of the series of experiments showed that: (a) the learning generalized to novel talkers and tokens (b) the perceptual training resulted in improved production, and (c) improvements in both perception and production were still evident when learners were tested months later. After 15 training sessions of 40 min each, learners’ identification showed a small but significant improvement. ( 1991), learners identified minimal-pair words containing /r/ or /l/ (e.g., rake or lake) and were given corrective feedback for incorrect responses. 1981) and laboratory training ( Bradlow et al. Discrimination of initially difficult contrasts, such as English /r/–/l/ for Japanese native listeners, can improve with naturalistic exposure ( MacKain et al. As perceived phonological overlap appears to improve with immersion experience, assessing category overlap may be useful for tracking L2 phonological development.įor learners of an L2, the question is whether and to what extent they are able to overcome their perceptual accent and acquire new phonological categories. Their performance on the task also accounted for their responses on /r/–/l/ identification and AXB discrimination tasks. Thus, L2 listeners appear to perceive a phonological overlap between /r/ and /l/. For those with more than 2 years of immersion, there was a separation of goodness ratings at both ends of the continuum, but the separation was smaller than it was for the native English speakers. Less experienced Japanese participants rated steps at the /l/-end of the continuum as equally good versions of /l/ and /r/, but steps at the /r/-end were rated as better versions of /r/ than /l/. The auditory stimuli were 10 steps of a synthetic /r/–/l/ continuum, plus /w/ and /j/, and the category labels were L, R, W, and Y. Japanese native speakers differing in English L2 immersion, and native English speakers, completed a forced category goodness rating task, where they rated the goodness of fit of an auditory stimulus to an English phonological category label. If so, improvements in discrimination accuracy with L2 experience should correspond to a reduction in overlap. That is, they perceive it to be an instance of more than one of their L2 phonological categories. How do L2 learners develop phonological categories to acquire a vocabulary when they cannot reliably tell them apart? This study aimed to test the possibility that learners establish new L2 categories but perceive phonological overlap between them when they perceive an L2 phone. Japanese learners of English can acquire /r/ and /l/, but discrimination accuracy rarely reaches native speaker levels. ![]()
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