Individual differences in the acquisition of second language phonology

Golestani, Narly; Zatorre, Robert J.

doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2008.01.005

Scientific article

English

Individual differences in the acquisition of second language phonology

Contributors

Golestani, Narly; Zatorre, Robert J.

Published in

Brain and language, vol. 109, no. 2-3, p. 55-67

Publication date

2009

Abstract

Perceptual training was employed to characterize individual differences in non-native speech sound learning. Fifty-nine adult English speakers were trained to distinguish the Hindi dental–retroflex contrast, as well as a tonal pitch contrast. Training resulted in overall group improvement in the ability to identify and to discriminate the phonetic and the tonal contrasts, but there were considerable individual differences in performance. A category boundary effect during the post-training discrimination of the Hindi but not of the tonal contrast suggests different learning mechanisms for these two stimulus types. Specifically, our results suggest that successful learning of the speech sounds involves the formation of a long-term memory category representation for the new speech sound.

Keywords

Phonetic learning
Behavioral plasticity
Language
Individual differences
Non-native
Hindi dental–retroflex contrast

UNIGE affiliation entities

Faculté de médecine / Section de médecine clinique / Département des neurosciences cliniques

UNIGE research groups

Brain and Language Lab

Funding

Swiss National Science Foundation - Experience-dependant brain structural and functional plasticity in simultaneous language interpreters

Citation (ISO format)

GOLESTANI, Narly, ZATORRE, Robert J. Individual differences in the acquisition of second language phonology. In: Brain and language, 2009, vol. 109, n° 2-3, p. 55–67. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2008.01.005

Article (Published version)

Identifiers

PID : unige:28655
DOI : 10.1016/j.bandl.2008.01.005

Journal ISSN

0093-934X

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1255downloads

Creation

05/06/2013 14:30:00

First validation

05/06/2013 14:30:00

Update

14/03/2023 20:19:03

Status update

14/03/2023 20:19:03

Last indexation

30/10/2024 09:41:22

Individual differences in the acquisition of second language phonology

Contributors

Published in

Publication date

Abstract

Keywords

UNIGE affiliation entities

UNIGE research groups

Funding

Citation (ISO format)

Main files (1)

Identifiers

Journal ISSN

Technical informations

Creation

First validation

Update

Status update

Last indexation