Training Native English Speakers to Perceive Japanese Length Contrasts in Word Versus Sentence Contexts

This study investigated whether native speakers of American English with no knowledge of Japanese could learn to perceive Japanese vowel and consonant length distinctions through auditory training with immediate feedback. One group of participants was trained to identify the number of moras in Japanese words spoken in isolation (word training), and another group in sentences (sentence training). Trained groups' pretest and post-test scores in the words-in-isolation context (word context) and the words-in-sentences context (sentence context) were compared to those of an untrained control group. The questions addressed were whether there was an overall effect of training, and whether there were differential effects of two types of training. Both trained groups showed similar improvement in their overall test scores. The results suggested that learning in one context generalized to the other. However, an advantage of sentence training over word training was found: at the post-test, there was a greater difference between the scores of the two contexts for the word-training group than for the sentence-training group. The results are discussed in terms of the factors that might contribute to the differences in second language learning between the word and the sentence contexts.