Unattended distributional training can shift phoneme boundaries

0562094 - PSÚ 2023 RIV US eng J - Journal Article
Chládková, Kateřina - Boersma, P. - Escudero, P.
Unattended distributional training can shift phoneme boundaries.
Bilingualism-Language and Cognition. Roč. 25, č. 5 (2022), s. 827-840. ISSN 1366-7289. E-ISSN 1469-1841
R&D Projects: GA ČR(CZ) GA18-01799S
Institutional support: RVO:68081740
Keywords : distributional learning * speech sounds * language acquisition * speech perception * mismatch response
OECD category: Psychology (including human - machine relations)
Impact factor: 3.6, year: 2022
Method of publishing: Open access
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bilingualism-language-and-cognition/article/unattended-distributional-training-can-shift-phoneme-boundaries/6F881A1019A997029488E0AF526BCB91

Listeners are sensitive to speech sounds' probability distributions. Distributional training (DT) studies with adults typically involve conscious activation of phoneme labels. We show that distributional exposure can shift existing phoneme boundaries (Spanish /e/-/i/) pre-attentively. Using a DT paradigm involving two bimodal distributions we assessed listener's neural discrimination across three sounds, showing pre-to-post-test improvement for the two adjacent sounds that fell into different clusters of the trained distribution than for those that fell into one cluster. Upon unattended exposure to an intricate stimulus set, listeners thus relocate native phoneme boundaries. We assessed whether the paradigm also works for category creation (Spanish establishing a duration contrast), where it has methodological advantages over the usual unimodal-versus-bimodal paradigm. DT yielded a greater effect for the /e/-/i/ boundary shift than for duration contrast creation. It seems that second-language phoneme contrasts similar to native ones might be easier to acquire than new contrasts.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0334511