Browsing by Subject "Acoustic Cue-Weighting"

Filter results by typing the first few letters
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Learning to perceive non-native tones via distributional training: Effects of task and acoustic cue weighting
    (MDPI, 2022-04-27) Liu, Liquan; Yuan, Chi; Ong, Jia Hoong; Tuninetti, Alba; Antoniou, Mark; Cutler, Anne; Escudero, Paola
    As many distributional learning (DL) studies have shown, adult listeners can achieve discrimination of a difficult non-native contrast after a short repetitive exposure to tokens falling at the extremes of that contrast. Such studies have shown using behavioural methods that a short distributional training can induce perceptual learning of vowel and consonant contrasts. However, much less is known about the neurological correlates of DL, and few studies have examined non-native lexical tone contrasts. Here, Australian-English speakers underwent DL training on a Mandarin tone contrast using behavioural (discrimination, identification) and neural (oddball-EEG) tasks, with listeners hearing either a bimodal or a unimodal distribution. Behavioural results show that listeners learned to discriminate tones after both unimodal and bimodal training; while EEG responses revealed more learning for listeners exposed to the bimodal distribution. Thus, perceptual learning through exposure to brief sound distributions (a) extends to non-native tonal contrasts, and (b) is sensitive to task, phonetic distance, and acoustic cue-weighting. Our findings have implications for models of how auditory and phonetic constraints influence speech learning. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.