Plasticity of non-native phonetic perception and production: a training study

Audiovisual perceptual training of non-native phonetic contrasts was conducted for 10 naive Japanese adults using audiovisual recordings of 13 native English speakers articulating 90 rl minimal word pairs, and analyzed changes in perceptual and articulatory representations of non-native phonetic contrasts. The speech identification score drastically improved during the training. The improvement in non-native rl perceptual distinction was clearly associated with the changes in the perceptual and articulatory representations, which represents perceptual/articulatory dissimilarities between the non-native and native phonemes as maps created using a multi-dimensional scaling analysis (MDS). Results suggested that the new nonnative phonetic categories can be acquired through proper training even in adulthood so that distances among exemplars within each of the acquired categories shrunk and distances between the categories stretch considerably compared to those of pretraining stage in the perceptual and articulatory representations.