15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

The Role of Visual Cues in L2 Consonant Perception

Anke Sennema, Valerie Hazan, Andrew Faulkner

University College London, UK

This study investigates the extent to which L2 learners extract phonetic information from visual cues in the perception of a novel phonemic contrast. 92 Japanese learners of English were tested on their perception of the /l/-/r/ contrast in audio, visual and audio-visual modalities. Overall identification rates in Audio and AV conditions did not differ significantly and few individual listeners showed evidence of AV benefit.
   Next, the relative benefit of training the perception of the /l/-/r/ contrast using auditory or audio-visual stimuli was evaluated for a subset of 41 Japanese learners of English. Both groups of listeners showed a significant benefit of training but learners with audio-visual training did not show greater improvement than listeners with auditory training. The learners' natural sensitivity to visual information was taken into account and analyses for a subset of learners revealed that initial visual awareness does not lead to more improvement over audio-visual training.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Sennema, Anke / Hazan, Valerie / Faulkner, Andrew (2003): "The role of visual cues in L2 consonant perception", In ICPhS-15, 135-138.