The Impact of Auditory Perceptual Training on the Perception and Production of English Vowels by Cypriot Greek Children and Adults

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of auditory perceptual phonetic training on the identification and production of English vowels by Cypriot Greek children and adults. Another two groups of Cypriot Greek child and adult speakers served as controls. The trained groups participated in the pretest, training, and posttest phase, while the controls completed only the pretest and posttest phase. The results showed that perceptual training improved identification accuracy, with children showing greater gains than adults. Although the performance of adults was poorer than the performance of children, their phonological system did undergo substantial alteration through perceptual phonetic training as they significantly improved their identifications in the posttest. Also, the results support a common mental space for the speech perception and production domains since the perceptually-oriented training affected the learners’ productions. However, transfer of improvements in production was observed only to some extent in children and not in adults, suggesting that training has an impact mostly on the trained modality and that some production improvement after perceptual training might be more evident in younger learners.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all individuals for their participation in the experiments. The participants were informed before the experiments about the goals of the study and their rights. Adults and both children and their parents/legal guardians signed a consent form to participate in the experiments. This paper has been supported by the RUDN University Strategic Academic Leadership Program.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).