Presentation

The Effect of Discrimination Training on Japanese Listeners’ Perception of the English Coda Consonants As in ‘Rose’ and ‘Roads’

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Abstract

The efficiency of phonetic training via discrimination tasks has been questioned, as phoneme-grapheme correspondence is not transparent in discrimination training. Indeed, we showed in a previous study that some Japanese learners of English associated the vowels in ‘ship’ and ‘sheep’ with the wrong orthographic representation. The current study evaluated if mislabeling issues would occur when Japanese learners of English train with the contrast as in ‘rose’ and ‘roads’, and whether any improvement over time would be observed. Forty native English speakers from North America participated as the group of reference. Twenty Japanese speakers received two discrimination training sessions of about thirty minutes with the target contrast, with stimuli varying along two relevant dimensions (coda closure duration, and vowel duration) to go from ‘rose’ to ‘roads’. The cue-weighting task administered before and after training revealed mislabeling issues that were present before training: The language learners associated a short vowel with the word ‘rose’ instead of the word ‘roads’. However, the learners improved their use of both vowel duration and coda closure duration towards native-like performance post training. Hence, discrimination training was effective for altering Japanese speakers’ use of the acoustic cues that contrast the English words ‘rose’ and ‘roads’.

How to Cite:

Grenon, I., Sheppard, C. & Archibald, J., (2018) “The Effect of Discrimination Training on Japanese Listeners’ Perception of the English Coda Consonants As in ‘Rose’ and ‘Roads’”, Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Proceedings 10(1).