Collaborative Research: A longitudinal approach to examining perception-production links in second language speech sound learning.

One of the main challenges of learning another language is learning how to pronounce the constituent sounds. For adult learners, the native language acts like a filter, which may prevent them from perceiving the sounds of the new language correctly. If they don’t perceive those sounds correctly, they may not produce them correctly. These pronunciation problems can affect learners’ ability to understand the new language and their ability to communicate in it. For example, when they listen to the new language, they may struggle to distinguish similar words and when they speak it, they may produce words that listeners don’t understand. Researchers know that perceiving sounds accurately is a prerequisite for producing them accurately, but little is known about how sound perception and sound production develop and influence one another. Understanding how these skills develop and interact is a necessary first step toward developing better models of pronunciation learning and better training procedures that can help students learn new languages more quickly and effectively. In this project, the investigators examine how the relationship between the ability to differentiate and produce sounds in a new language develops over time. This will be accomplished by training participants on sound perception, sound production, or both. Performance in both skills will be measured at multiple points throughout training to investigate how performance in each area changes over time and how the relationship between them evolves over time. Participants’ ability to apply the knowledge they learned during training to new words and to words spoken in a new voice will also be tested, as a means of investigating how different types of training help second language learners deal with variability in speech. The results will lay the foundation for developing a more comprehensive model of second language sound learning. Additionally, findings will provide insight into how pronunciation instruction can be optimized to help learners perceive and produce the sounds and words of other languages accurately, forming the basis for effective second language communication. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.