| Summary: | My research focuses on perceptual approaches to second language speech learning, or pronunciation training. Two main approaches to perceptual training have been investigated in the literature: (1) perceptual fading in which learners are presented stimuli from opposite ends of a synthetic continuum in which the differences between the members of the non-native phonemic contrast have been exaggerated (Jamieson and Morosan, 1986), and (2) High-Variability Pronunciation Training (HVPT) in which learners are presented minimal pairs containing the non-native phonemic contrasts in forced-choice identification format (Logan et al., 1991). While these techniques, in particular HVPT, have been demonstrated to be effective in lab-based studies, they typically involve just one simple task, e.g. forced-choice identification, which the learner is required to repeat ad nauseum. To ensure that learners persist with training when a wider variety of phonemic contrasts are to be trained, I believe that a greater variety of tasks is required. In this poster, I present an experiment which compared two versions of HVPT, one employing an identification task and one employing a discrimination task. Future research will explore a wider variety of tasks in combination with the use of synthetic continua.
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