Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2011 Jul;130(1):461-72. doi: 10.1121/1.3593366.
Studies evaluating phonological contrast learning typically investigate either the predictiveness of specific pretraining aptitude measures or the efficacy of different instructional paradigms. However, little research considers how these factors interact--whether different students learn better from different types of instruction--and what the psychological basis for any interaction might be. The present study demonstrates that successfully learning a foreign-language phonological contrast for pitch depends on an interaction between individual differences in perceptual abilities and the design of the training paradigm. Training from stimuli with high acoustic-phonetic variability is generally thought to improve learning; however, we found high-variability training enhanced learning only for individuals with strong perceptual abilities. Learners with weaker perceptual abilities were actually impaired by high-variability training relative to a low-variability condition. A second experiment assessing variations on the high-variability training design determined that the property of this learning environment most detrimental to perceptually weak learners is the amount of trial-by-trial variability. Learners' perceptual limitations can thus override the benefits of high-variability training where trial-by-trial variability in other irrelevant acoustic-phonetic features obfuscates access to the target feature. These results demonstrate the importance of considering individual differences in pretraining aptitudes when evaluating the efficacy of any speech training paradigm.
研究评估语音对比学习通常会考察特定的预培训能力衡量标准的可预测性或不同教学模式的效果。然而，很少有研究考虑这些因素如何相互作用——不同的学生是否从不同类型的教学中学习得更好——以及任何相互作用的心理基础可能是什么。本研究表明，成功学习外语音系对比的音高取决于个体感知能力差异与训练模式设计之间的相互作用。一般认为，从具有高声学语音可变性的刺激中进行训练可以提高学习效果；然而，我们发现，对于感知能力较强的个体来说，高变异性训练确实可以提高学习效果。与低变异性条件相比，感知能力较弱的学习者实际上会因高变异性训练而受到损害。第二个评估高变异性训练设计变化的实验确定，对感知能力较弱的学习者最不利的学习环境特性是逐次试验可变性的数量。因此，学习者的感知局限性可以抵消高变异性训练的好处，因为其他不相关的声学语音特征的逐次试验可变性会妨碍对目标特征的访问。这些结果表明，在评估任何语音训练模式的效果时，考虑预培训能力的个体差异非常重要。
