INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

The Role of Variability in Non-Native Perceptual Learning of a Japanese Geminate-Singleton Fricative Contrast

Makiko Sadakata, James M. McQueen

Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, The Netherlands

The current study reports the enhancing effect of a high variability training procedure in the learning of a Japanese geminate-singleton fricative contrast. Dutch natives took part in a five-day training procedure in which they identified geminate and singleton variants of the Japanese fricative /s/. They heard either many repetitions of a limited set of words recorded by a single speaker (simple training) or fewer repetitions of a more variable set of words recorded by multiple speakers (variable training). Pre-post identification evaluations and a transfer test indicated clear benefits of the variable training.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Sadakata, Makiko / McQueen, James M. (2011): "The role of variability in non-native perceptual learning of a Japanese geminate-singleton fricative contrast", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 873-876.