Unattended distributional training can shift phoneme boundaries

Abstract Listeners are sensitive to speech sounds’ probability distributions. Distributional training (DT) studies with adults typically involve conscious activation of phoneme labels. We show that distributional exposure can shift existing boundaries (Spanish /e/–/i/) pre-attentively. Using a DT paradigm involving two bimodal distributions we assessed listener's neural discrimination across three sounds, showing pre-to-post-test improvement for the adjacent sounds fell into different clusters trained distribution than those one cluster. Upon unattended an intricate stimulus set, listeners thus relocate native boundaries. whether also works category creation establishing duration contrast), where it has methodological advantages over usual unimodal-versus-bimodal paradigm. yielded greater effect /e/–/i/ boundary contrast creation. It seems second-language contrasts similar ones might be easier acquire new contrasts.