The creation of a new vowel category by adult learners after adaptive phonetic training

Publication date: January 2019Source: Journal of Phonetics, Volume 72Author(s): Izabelle Grenon, Mikio Kubota, Chris SheppardAbstractNative Japanese speakers often perceive English vowels based on their duration, whereas native speakers use spectral cues (formant frequencies). The current study examined whether 23 Japanese adult learners of English could create a new vowel category along the spectral dimension after phonetic training with the English vowels /i/-/ɪ/ as in beat and bit. As in previous training studies, the Japanese trainees improved their ability to categorize the vowels in tokens included in the training, and were able to generalize to novel tokens and talkers. A cue-weighting task confirmed that the Japanese trainees categorized the vowels based on temporal cues before tr...

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