Perceptual scaffolding of non-native speech categories through videogame-based training
Ran Liu, Lori L. Holt · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2015
Adults learn many new tasks with ease, but acquiring the sounds of a new language is notoriously difficult. Decades of attempts to develop effective training regimens have focused primarily on highly explicit approaches to training adults to categorize non-native speech sounds. Participants are aware of the phonetic distinctions they are learning, focus their attention on the contrasts or categories of interest, and are provided with some form of overt trial-by-trial feedback. A growing body of perceptual learning research suggests that directing attention away from the task of learning sounds by embedding training in tasks with overt goals that are unrelated to sound training can lead to efficient learning gains. We leverage this idea to incidentally train native English-speaking adults on non-linguistic auditory categories that are highly relevant to Mandarin Chinese lexical tone perception. We observed significant incidental learning of the nonspeech auditory categories as a result of five days of incidental videogame training and highly significant generalization to natural spoken productions of Mandarin tones. We also observed preliminary evidence that nonspeech category learning transferred to boost Mandarin vocabulary learning. We discuss these results in the context of incidental category learning and perceptual scaffolding of non-native speech categories.