In this study, we trained Southern French speakers to exploit the /e/-/ / contrast by asking them to associate new minimal pairs of “words” with visual shapes. Although, the performance in the training session was relatively high, the learning did not transfer to task known to reflect lexical access. This research underlines the difficulty for adult listeners to acquire new phonemic categories and highlights the importance to use a wide variety of task including on-line word recognition to assess training on a specific contrast