Second-Language Learners' Identification of Target-Language Phonemes: A Short-Term Phonetic Training Study

This study examined the effect of short-term high-variability phonetic training on the perception of English /b/, /v/, /d/, /partial derivative/, /ae/, /boolean AND/, /i/, and /I/ by Catalan/Spanish bilinguals learning English as a foreign language. Sixteen English-major undergraduates were tested before and after undergoing a four-session perceptual training program involving a series of discrimination and identification tasks. Although some scores were already high at pre-test, there was improvement from pre-test to post-test, and this improvement generalized to novel words and a novel talker. An effect of word frequency was observed, but this effect was found to decrease after training. The results show that relatively advanced foreign-language learners in an instructional setting may improve in perception as a result of short-term high-variability phonetic training. The implications of these findings for the teaching of pronunciation are discussed.