Werker (1989) has shown that within the first year of life the infant begins to move from language-universal abilities to the language-specific abilities that are characteristic of the adult. In particular, we examine several of the theoretical assumptions underlying previous efforts to train listeners to distinguish nonnative phonetic contrasts and consider some of the issues raised by this earlier work (see also Pisoni et al., 1991).Ī developmental account of the problems facing adult second language learners is a useful starting point for considering the points raised above because of the potential parallels between the acquisition of phonetic categories in the child’s first language and acquisition of nonnative phonetic categories while learning a second language in adulthood. How flexible is the adult perceptual system, with regard to novel phonetic categories? What conditions facilitate the development of novel phonetic categories in adults? The work described in the present paper focuses on several of these theoretical issues in the context of training Japanese listeners to identify the English phonemes /r/ and /l/. From a theoretical viewpoint, the phenomenon also poses several interesting questions: How did these language-specific linguistic categories arise?. In a practical sense, this means that an individual learning a second language may experience difficulty distinguishing certain phonetic contrasts in the second language. This phenomenon has both practical and theoretical implications. When listeners are presented with speech stimuli from phonetic categories that are not used in their own language they typically show performance that is not as good as a native speaker of the language from which the phonemes were selected (e.g., Miyawaki et al., 1975 Werker and Logan, 1985). The results demonstrate the importance of stimulus variability and task-related factors in training nonnative speakers to perceive novel phonetic contrasts that are not distinctive in their native language. Small but reliable differences in performance were obtained between pretest and posttest scores. Results from six subjects showed that the new procedure was more robust than earlier training techniques. A pretest–posttest design containing natural tokens was used to assess the effects of training. Japanese subjects were trained in a minimal pair identification paradigm using multiple natural exemplars contrasting /r/ and /l/ from a variety of phonetic environments as stimuli. In the present study, a different training procedure that emphasized variability among stimulus tokens was used. Previous research that attempted to train Japanese listeners to distinguish this contrast using synthetic stimuli reported little success, especially when transfer to natural tokens containing /r/ and /l/ was tested. Native speakers of Japanese learning English generally have difficulty differentiating the phonemes /r/ and /l/, even after years of experience with English.
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