Final Report Summary - VOCAL ATHLETES (Behavioural and brain bases for phonetic aptitude in monolingual and bilingual learners of a foreign language)
Many learners of a foreign language struggle to correctly pronounce newly-learned speech sounds so that they can be understood by native listeners. Yet many others achieve this with apparent ease. The aim of this project was to find out what is responsible for these large individual differences in phonetic aptitude. Are better speakers also better listeners? A special focus of the research was to compare bilingual with monolingual learners, because bilinguals have had more experience with linguistic variation than monolinguals, and therefore might have greater phonetic aptitude. The study reported here is the first of its kind investigating individual differences in the training of non-native (L2) production and perception of complex consonant clusters in late second-language learners.
The first objective of the research was to investigate the perception and production interface while training learners in foreign languages they have unlikely learned before (e.g. Slovak). Forty learners were tested in three sessions on a battery of perception and production tasks in the foreign language as well as on tasks assessing their L1 abilities. In line with some previous studies, the results showed that the short training (15 minutes) and the type of training (repetition after auditory and orthographic presentation of foreign words) resulted in rather weak or no improvements in the different perception tasks. Despite the lack of strong learning effects, there were large differences between learners both in the performance level and learning trajectory. This suggests either different levels of motivation or different levels of phonetic aptitude across a participant sample with a lot of experience with learning foreign languages. It is, however, noteworthy that all participants succeeded to some degree in learning the rather complex and unfamiliar phonology of Slovak: none performed at chance level in the perception tasks and none had very low ratings in the production tasks. It is also interesting that none of the L1 skills assessed here predicted L2 perception and production performance, and that only mispronunciation detection but not the other perception tasks correlated with L2 production. At the same time, there were two participants who excelled both in L2 perception and production, and performed in their productions to a degree that was relatively close to native speaker performance (within two standard deviations from L1 speakers mean ratings) at this early L2 stage. This could be taken as confirming previous suggestions that native-like levels of production can only (if at all) be achieved after some (perhaps substantial) training. However, it should be noted that 2 out of 40 participants achieved native-like levels and thus it is conceivable that even more successful 'non-native producers' can be identified with a larger sample. Having a larger sample would also increase the power to identify the differences and commonalities underlying phonetic aptitude.
Thus the results suggest that it is possible to identify successful learners even at the very initial stages of L2 acquisition. Given the large individual variation which was observed across all tasks, we conjectured that most likely only large-scale studies would provide reliable clues about the factors underlying performance differences in complex language learning tasks. Therefore, the tasks have been simplified and shortened to allow testing a large number of subjects within a short period of time. With this large set of subjects, we were hoping to be better able to address the question of whether there is a difference in phonetic aptitude between monolinguals and bilinguals. To this end, 244 participants were tested, and an analysis of a subset of the participants confirmed large individual differences and a small advantage for bilingual speakers. However, it turned out to be a challenge to obtain a balanced data set because it was hard to find enough monolingual speakers within the Basque / Spanish community. To solve this problem, a new lab has been recently established in a rather monolingual Spanish city, where it will be possible to obtain more monolingual participants in the near future.
Due to the premature termination of the project, the second objective of the project is in progress. The aim was to investigate the role of auditory and motor systems in L2 speech perception and production with participants, whose performance was either very high or very low within both the monolingual and bilingual population, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Further results are expected in the near future.
The first objective of the research was to investigate the perception and production interface while training learners in foreign languages they have unlikely learned before (e.g. Slovak). Forty learners were tested in three sessions on a battery of perception and production tasks in the foreign language as well as on tasks assessing their L1 abilities. In line with some previous studies, the results showed that the short training (15 minutes) and the type of training (repetition after auditory and orthographic presentation of foreign words) resulted in rather weak or no improvements in the different perception tasks. Despite the lack of strong learning effects, there were large differences between learners both in the performance level and learning trajectory. This suggests either different levels of motivation or different levels of phonetic aptitude across a participant sample with a lot of experience with learning foreign languages. It is, however, noteworthy that all participants succeeded to some degree in learning the rather complex and unfamiliar phonology of Slovak: none performed at chance level in the perception tasks and none had very low ratings in the production tasks. It is also interesting that none of the L1 skills assessed here predicted L2 perception and production performance, and that only mispronunciation detection but not the other perception tasks correlated with L2 production. At the same time, there were two participants who excelled both in L2 perception and production, and performed in their productions to a degree that was relatively close to native speaker performance (within two standard deviations from L1 speakers mean ratings) at this early L2 stage. This could be taken as confirming previous suggestions that native-like levels of production can only (if at all) be achieved after some (perhaps substantial) training. However, it should be noted that 2 out of 40 participants achieved native-like levels and thus it is conceivable that even more successful 'non-native producers' can be identified with a larger sample. Having a larger sample would also increase the power to identify the differences and commonalities underlying phonetic aptitude.
Thus the results suggest that it is possible to identify successful learners even at the very initial stages of L2 acquisition. Given the large individual variation which was observed across all tasks, we conjectured that most likely only large-scale studies would provide reliable clues about the factors underlying performance differences in complex language learning tasks. Therefore, the tasks have been simplified and shortened to allow testing a large number of subjects within a short period of time. With this large set of subjects, we were hoping to be better able to address the question of whether there is a difference in phonetic aptitude between monolinguals and bilinguals. To this end, 244 participants were tested, and an analysis of a subset of the participants confirmed large individual differences and a small advantage for bilingual speakers. However, it turned out to be a challenge to obtain a balanced data set because it was hard to find enough monolingual speakers within the Basque / Spanish community. To solve this problem, a new lab has been recently established in a rather monolingual Spanish city, where it will be possible to obtain more monolingual participants in the near future.
Due to the premature termination of the project, the second objective of the project is in progress. The aim was to investigate the role of auditory and motor systems in L2 speech perception and production with participants, whose performance was either very high or very low within both the monolingual and bilingual population, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Further results are expected in the near future.