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Journal ArticleDOI

Auditory vs. Articulatory Training in Exotic Sounds.

01 Nov 1970-The Modern Language Journal (Blackwell Publishing Ltd)-Vol. 54, Iss: 7, pp 477-481
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that what is effective in teaching sound production and discrimination is the systematic development by small steps from known articulatory postures and movements to new and unknown ones.
Abstract: T WO groups of English speakers received either auditory or articulatory instruction in learning to produce exotic sounds. Performance on production and discrimination tests indicated a striking superiority for the subjects who received systematic training in the production of exotic sounds as opposed to those subjects who received only discrimination training in listening to these sounds. The results of this study suggest that what is effective in the teaching of sound production and discrimination is the systematic development by small steps from known articulatory postures and movements to new and unknown ones. The
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article examined the relationship between the production and perception of English /r/ and /l/ by native Japanese adults learning English in the United States, and found that the difficulty in perception of the liquid contrast varied with its position in the word.
Abstract: This study examines the relationship between the production and perception of English /r/ and /l/ by native Japanese adults learning English in the United States. For some subjects, production of the contrast was more accurate than their perception of it, replicating and extending a previous finding reported by Goto (1971) in Japan. The difficulty in perception of the liquid contrast varied with its position in the word. Prevocalic /r/ and /l/ in consonant clusters yielded the greatest perceptual errors, while word-final liquids were accurately perceived. This pattern of errors is not predictable on the basis of contrastive phonological analysis, but might be the result of acoustic-phonetic factors. Implications for second language pedagogy are discussed.

352 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: From being a relatively neglected area in the study of second language learning, speech acquisition has emerged over the last decade as an important research field with a wide range of approaches; the traditions of articulatory, acoustic, perceptual, phonetic, phonological, and psycholinguists investigation contribute a rare interdisplinence to this area of linguistic inquiry as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: From being a relatively neglected area in the study of second language learning, the acquisition of second language speech has emerged over the last decade as an important research field with a wide range of approaches; the traditions of articulatory, acoustic, perceptual, phonetic, phonological, and psycholinguists investigation contribute a rare interdisdplinarity to this area of linguistic inquiry. Current scholarly interest augurs well for future theoretical advances.

113 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Kazuya Saito1
TL;DR: This article examined whether and to what degree providing explicit phonetic information (EI) at the beginning of form-focused instruction (FFI) on second language pronunciation can enhance the generalizability and magnitude of FFI effectiveness by increasing learners' ability to notice a new phone.
Abstract: The present study examines whether and to what degree providing explicit phonetic information (EI) at the beginning of form-focused instruction (FFI) on second language pronunciation can enhance the generalizability and magnitude of FFI effectiveness by increasing learners’ ability to notice a new phone. Participants were 49 Japanese learners of English in English as a foreign language setting. Whereas the control group (n = 14) received meaning-oriented lessons without any focus on form, the experimental groups received 4 hr of FFI treatment designed to encourage them to practice the target feature of an English /ɹ/ in meaningful discourse. Instructors provided EI (i.e., multiple exposure to an exaggerated model pronunciation of /ɹ/ and rule presentation on the relevant articulatory configurations) to the FFI+EI group (n = 17) but not to the FFI-only group (n = 18). Their pre- and posttest performance was acoustically analyzed according to various lexical, task, and following vowel conditions. The results of the ANOVAs showed that (a) the FFI-only group demonstrated moderate improvement with medium effects (e.g., change from hybrid exemplars to poor exemplars), particularly in familiar lexical contexts, and (b) the FFI+EI group not only demonstrated considerable improvement with large effects (e.g., change from hybrid exemplars to good exemplars) but also generalized the instructional gains to unfamiliar lexical contexts beyond the instructional materials.

111 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The findings suggest that the pronunciation training program developed and used here was effective in improving the ability of native English speakers to produce and perceive Japanese pitch and durational contrasts.
Abstract: This study assessed the efficacy of a pronunciation training program that provided fundamental frequency contours as visual feedback to native English speakers acquiring Japanese pitch and durational contrasts. Native English speakers who had previously studied Japanese for 1-5 years in the United States participated in training using Kay Elemetrics' CSL-Pitch Program. The training materials were words, phrases, and sentences that contained Japanese pitch and durational contrasts. During training the subjects practiced matching the fundamental frequency contours of Japanese-native models shown on a computer screen. The subjects' ability to produce and to perceive novel Japanese words was tested in two contexts, that is, words in isolation and words in sentences, before and after training. Their ability was compared to that of a native English control group that had previously studied Japanese for 1-5 years but did not participate in the training. The trained subjects improved significantly for words in se...

103 citations


Cites background from "Auditory vs. Articulatory Training ..."

  • ...However, there has been little agreement on the effects of production training relative to perceptual training (Catford & Pisoni, 1970; Leather, 1990; Leather & James, 1991; Schneiderman, Bourdages, & Champagne, 1988; Weiss, 1992)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is concluded that frontoparietal cortices, including ventral motor and somatosensory areas, reflect phonological information during speech perception and exert a causal influence on language understanding.
Abstract: In the neuroscience of language, phonemes are frequently described as multimodal units whose neuronal representations are distributed across perisylvian cortical regions, including auditory and sensorimotor areas. A different position views phonemes primarily as acoustic entities with posterior temporal localization, which are functionally independent from frontoparietal articulatory programs. To address this current controversy, we here discuss experimental results from neuroimaging (fMRI) as well as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies. On first glance, a mixed picture emerges, with earlier research documenting neurofunctional distinctions between phonemes in both temporal and frontoparietal sensorimotor systems, but some recent work seemingly failing to replicate the latter. Detailed analysis of methodological differences between studies reveals that the way experiments are set up explains whether sensorimotor cortex maps phonological information during speech perception or not. In particular, acoustic noise during the experiment and ‘motor noise’ caused by button press tasks work against the frontoparietal manifestation of phonemes. We highlight recent studies using sparse imaging and passive speech perception tasks along with multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) and especially representational similarity analysis (RSA), which succeeded in separating acoustic-phonological from general-acoustic processes and in mapping specific phonological information on temporal and frontoparietal regions. The question about a causal role of sensorimotor cortex on speech perception and understanding is addressed by reviewing recent TMS studies. We conclude that frontoparietal cortices, including ventral motor and somatosensory areas, reflect phonological information during speech perception and exert a causal influence on understanding.

101 citations


Cites background from "Auditory vs. Articulatory Training ..."

  • ...…of functional contributions ofmotor systems to speech perception and comprehension comes from the observation that practice in producing unfamiliar sounds or accents significantly improves their discrimination/comprehension (Catford and Pisoni, 1970; Adank et al., 2010; Kartushina et al., 2015)....

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References
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors have pointed out that it is precisely in areas other tha that of cross-versational interaction, where it appears impossible to find a substitute for the human t ach r, that programmed instruction has the richest potential.
Abstract: quences which will provide additional exposure and drill in problem areas of a language. An example of this is a recently produced sequence devoted to the use of honorifics in Japanese.42 It appears that the subjunctive in the Romance languages, the modals in German or English, would constitute equally apt subjects. The School of Language Studies of the State Department as we have pointed out, now includes an introductory programmed segment in its regular intensive course for Spanish and other languages. It may well be that it is precisely in areas other tha that of c nversational interaction, where it appears impossible to find a substitute for the human t ach r, that programmed instruction has the richest potential. Its surface has barely been scratched, including as it does, such possibilities as remedial and diagnostic sequences, supplementary drills and exercises, tourist and military type short courses, and eve entire reading courses-a field which has been too little explored.

12 citations