ASA 129th Meeting - Washington, DC - 1995 May 30 .. Jun 06
5pSC7. Testing the importance of talker variability in non-native speech
contrast training.
James S. Magnuson
Reiko A. Yamada
Yoh'ichi Tohkura
ATR Human Info. Process. Labs., 2-2 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun,
Kyoto, 619-02, Japan
Ann R. Bradlow
Indiana Univ., Bloomington, IN 47408
In contrast to results of training with stimuli produced by 5 talkers,
Lively et al. [ 1242--1255 (1993)] reported that Japanese adults
trained to perceive English /r/ and /l/ with stimuli produced by a single
talker failed to improve from pretest to post-test, or to generalize to novel
stimuli. That study was extended by training 5 groups of subjects each with a
different talker, and by examining the retention of learning after 3 and 6
months. The previous results were partially replicated: Although all subjects
showed significant learning during training, subjects in 3 of the 5 groups did
not show significant improvement in a pretest--post-test comparison, did not
generalize well to new stimuli, and did not show good retention in 3- and
6-month follow-up tests. Subjects in two of the five groups improved
significantly from pretest to post-test, generalized well to new stimuli, and
showed retention comparable to that of subjects trained with multiple talkers.
The results indicate that while multiple-talker training leads to consistently
good results, training with stimuli produced by only one talker may fail to
promote generalization to new stimuli and talkers under certain conditions.