Studies evaluating phonological contrast learning typically investigate either the predictiveness of specific pretraining aptitude measures or the efficacy of different instructional paradigms. However, little research considers how these factors interact—whether different students learn better from different types of instruction—and what the psychological basis for any interaction might be. The present study demonstrates that successfully learning a foreign-language phonological contrast for pitch depends on an interaction between individual differences in perceptual abilities and the design of the training paradigm. Training from stimuli with high acoustic-phonetic variability is generally thought to improve learning; however, we found high-variability training enhanced learning only for individuals with strong perceptual abilities. Learners with weaker perceptual abilities were actually impaired by high-variability training relative to a low-variability condition. A second experiment assessing variations on the high-variability training design determined that the property of this learning environment most detrimental to perceptually weak learners is the amount of trial-by-trial variability. Learners’ perceptual limitations can thus override the benefits of high-variability training where trial-by-trial variability in other irrelevant acoustic-phonetic features obfuscates access to the target feature. These results demonstrate the importance of considering individual differences in pretraining aptitudes when evaluating the efficacy of any speech training paradigm.
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July 2011
July 19 2011
Learning a novel phonological contrast depends on interactions between individual differences and training paradigm design
Tyler K. Perrachione;
Tyler K. Perrachione
1
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139Hugh Knowles Center for Clinical and Basic Science in Hearing and Its Disorders, Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders,
Northwestern University
, Evanston, Illinois 60208
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Jiyeon Lee;
Jiyeon Lee
Hugh Knowles Center for Clinical and Basic Science in Hearing and Its Disorders, Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders,
Northwestern University
, Evanston, Illinois 60208
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Louisa Y. Y. Ha;
Louisa Y. Y. Ha
Hugh Knowles Center for Clinical and Basic Science in Hearing and Its Disorders, Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders,
Northwestern University
, Evanston, Illinois 60208
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Patrick C. M. Wong
Hugh Knowles Center for Clinical and Basic Science in Hearing and Its Disorders, Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders,
Northwestern University
, Evanston, Illinois 60208
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a)
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Electronic mail: pwong@northwestern.edu
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 130, 461–472 (2011)
Article history
Received:
August 31 2010
Accepted:
May 04 2011
Citation
Tyler K. Perrachione, Jiyeon Lee, Louisa Y. Y. Ha, Patrick C. M. Wong; Learning a novel phonological contrast depends on interactions between individual differences and training paradigm design. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 July 2011; 130 (1): 461–472. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.3593366
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