The effect of high variability phonetic training on the production of English vowels and consonants

This study evaluated Korean early learners’ production of English vowels and consonants before and after high variability phonetic training (HVPT), for the purpose of investigating the effects of perceptual training on speech production. Korean learners aged 11-12 were trained to discriminate multiple sets of English vowel and consonant contrasts, and their preand posttraining recordings were evaluated by native speakers of English. Although the trainees showed significant improvements for some sounds, the overall results demonstrated that the effect of perceptual learning on speech production is not significant and the improvements in the two domains (i.e., perception and production) are not correlated.