The difficulty of non-native speech sound acquisition depends on several
factors in addition to the central role of the mother tongue sound system. Age
of exposure, amount of exposure as well as the type of training provided have
been shown to have an effect on learning outcomes. In addition, theories of
speech perception suggest that perception and production may either be strongly
dependent upon each other as to the degree that perception triggers motoric
patterns as well, or that activation of the auditory system is enough for perception
so that the production system remains inactivated. In order to study whether
mere exposure to auditory stimulation would result in production changes, we
selected two groups of Finnish learners in a two-day listen-and-repeat training
protocol. Both groups were auditively exposed to a non-native speech sound
contrast embedded in a semi-synthetically produced pseudo-word context /ty:ti/
- /tʉ:ti/. While the passive listening
group merely listened to the stimulus pairs without any motoric actions, the
production group actively produced the stimulus words according to the provided
model. We performed acoustic analyses and extracted the values of the two
lowest resonance frequencies, formant 1 (F1) and formant 2 (F2) from the
productions. The results indicated no statistically significant differences
between the groups, neither in the formant values nor in their standard
deviations. However, as a function of training, both groups showed clear
changes in the standard deviation values thus indicating changes in production performances.
This suggests that both training protocols have an effect on production
learning, and more importantly, that the motoric commands seem to alter on the
basis of mere auditory stimulation. This further suggests that the motoric
system is activated even in perceptual tasks.</p
