DOES TRAINING IN SPEECH PERCEPTION MODIFY SPEECH PRODUCTION
DOES TRAINING IN SPEECH PERCEPTION MODIFY SPEECH PRODUCTION
To examine the relationship between speech perception and production in second language acquisition, this study investigated whethex training in the perception domain transfers to improvement in the production domain. Native speakers of Japanese wen trained to identifi English lrl-N minimal pairs. Recordings were made of the subjects’ productions of minimal pairs before and after identification training. American-English listeners then perceptually evaluated these productions. The subjects showed significant improvements from pretest to post-test in perception as well as in production. Furthermore, the subjects retained these abilities in follow-up tests given three months and six months after the conclusion of mining. These results demonstrate that training m the perception domain produces long-tmn modifications in both perception and production, implying a close link between speech perception and production. DOES TRAINING IN SPEECH PERCEPTION MODIFY SPEECH PRODUCTION
The relationship between speech Perception and production has been a long-standing issue in second language (L2) acquisition as well as in native language (L1) acquisition. It is well-known that some phonetic contrasts in one language are difficult for speakers of another language to perceive and produce. For example, the English /r/4 contrast is remarkably difficult for Japanese speakers to perceive and produce even after many years of education in English as an L2, or immersion in an English-speaking environment. Yamada et al. (1994 161) have shown a significant correlation between perception acwacy and production intelligibility of English Irl-N tokens by Japanese speakers. This result implies a link between perception and production in L2 acquisition. However, few studies have examined this perception-production link directly. One way of addressing this issue is to investigate the effects of artificial changes in one domain, either perception or production, on the other domain.