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Chapter 17 - Investigating the Role of Cognitive Abilities in Phonetic Learning of Foreign Consonants and Lexical Tones

from Part V - Cognitive and Psychological Variables

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2021

By
Irina A. Shport
Edited by
Ratree Wayland
Ratree Wayland
Affiliation:
University of Florida
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Summary

The goal of this study was to examine the role of cognitive abilities in implicit learning of two types of contrasts — lexical tone contrasts and coronal consonant contrasts. Twenty-four adult native English speakers naïve to Vietnamese were asked to learn the names of twelve funny monsters, that is monosyllabic words differing in tones and initial consonants. After a word-identification training with feedback, learning was assessed using a 12-word alternative test and an auditory discrimination test. In addition, participants completed six tests of cognitive abilities involving episodic memory, working memory, executive function and attention, processing speed, and vocabulary (NIH & Northwestern University, 2006-2012). For both identification and discrimination, the proportion of tone errors was significantly larger than the proportion of consonant errors, but cognitive measures did not predict the occurrence of tone versus consonant errors. Processing speed and executive function and attention scores were significantly correlated with response accuracies in both tests. These results suggest that for beginning learners, individual differences in some cognitive abilities related to the fluid cognition complex correlate with implicit learning of phonetic categories of different types. However, working memory, arguably the most studied factor, appears not to matter in this learning scenario.

Keywords

CognitiveAbilitiesSpeechLearningTonesVietnameseConsonantsPhoneticsWorkingMemory
Type
Chapter
Information
Second Language Speech Learning
Theoretical and Empirical Progress
 , pp. 418 - 438
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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