The effects of production training on speech perception in L2 learners of German

Abstract

The present study examines the effects of production training on speech perception in English-speaking L2 learners of German. Forty-five third-semester German language students at a North American university were divided into three learning conditions: explicit, implicit, or control. Learners in the explicit condition received six twenty-minute training sessions on German articulatory phonetics and phonology, targeting both consonants and vowels. Changes in L2 perception were measured by an AX discrimination task and a binary forced choice identification task. Results indicate that learners in the explicit group significantly outperformed learners in the implicit and control groups, improving auditory discrimination of novel contrasts by an average of 19 percent and perceptual categorization by 14 percent. The findings provide support for motor theory models of speech perception and show that improvements in L2 perception can be a positive concomitant of exclusively production-based training, highlighting that production and perception are inextricably linked.