Dia: 15 d'abril del 2024
Hora: 12.30 h
Lloc: aula 52.939 - 9a planta edifici 52. Roc Boronat - Campus del Poblenou - UPF i també en línia.

Resum:
High variability phonetic training (HVPT) has proven its effectiveness regarding the improvement of L2 phonetic learning [1]. Both non-words (NW) and real words (RW) have been used in phonetic training regimes, resulting in phonetic improvement, but some previous studies report greater gains when training with NWs as opposed to  RWs, as the former allow learners to focus on the distinctive phonetic features while eliminating interference from the lexicon [e.g., 2, 3]. However, the tasks typically used to test both RWs and NWs (i.e., phoneme identification and discrimination) effectiveness are purely phonetic, and recent studies found that accuracy in prelexical categorization does not necessarily translate into the establishment of robust distinctions at the lexical level [4, 5]. These mismatches thus question the generalizability of NW training regimes to lexical processing.

The current study compares the effectiveness of an audiovisual HVPT regime using NWs to a comparable regime using RWs for gains at a phonetic as well as lexical level, both in perception and production. L1-Catalan/Spanish learners of English with an upper-intermediate proficiency level completed a total of 6 15-minute training sessions (60 trials each) involving the identification of English front vowels (/iː/, /ɪ/, /ɛ/ and /æ/). A subset of participants completed an audiovisual training with RWs, whereas the other half were trained using comparable NWs. All participants completed a series of pre- and post-training tasks which varied in the extent to which they required lexical processing. As for perception, trainees completed a word picture matching task (WPM) and an identification task involving RWs followed by NWs. Regarding production, trainees took part in a sentence reading task, followed by a word reading task and a delayed repetition task, the latter involving RWs first and then NWs.

Forty-four participants (NW group: 20; RW group: 24) participated in the study and preliminary results show an overall higher accuracy in the identification tasks than in the WPM task both at pre- and post-test. In addition, improvement from pre-test to post-test also appears to be considerably larger for the former, which signals a greater gain at a phonetic than at a lexical level. Interestingly, regarding identification, the group trained with RWs improved to a greater extent than the NW group not only in the identification of RWs but also for NW stimuli. When it comes to production, results also show a general improvement in the distinction of the /i:/-/ɪ/ pair, and, to a lesser extent, the /ɛ/-/æ/ contrast. However, this gain is again greater in the case of the RW group, particularly in the two reading tasks, which involve a greater degree of lexical processing than the repetition tasks. Thus, preliminary results do not show a superiority of NW over RW. On the contrary, the RW group tends to show greater gains, especially in tasks that require more lexical activation.