Thanks or Tanks: Training with Tactile Cues Improves Learners’ Accuracy of English Interdental Consonants in an Oral Reading Task

ABSTRACT

The present study investigates whether training second language pronunciation with tactile cues facilitates the production of non-native sounds involving accessible articulatory features. In a between-subjects experiment with a pretest-training-posttest design, 50 Turkish learners of English received audiovisual training on a set of target words and sentences containing two English interdental fricatives, /θ/ and /ð/, in one of two conditions, tactile and non-tactile. The tactile condition involved self-touching the tongue as it protruded during pronunciation of the two target sounds. Participants’ pronunciation performance was assessed through a word-imitation task, a sentence-imitation task, and a discourse reading task. Results showed that while both training conditions helped learners to improve their pronunciation performance in all three tasks, the tactile condition triggered greater improvements in the discourse reading task. These results extend previous findings on the benefits of tactile input for speech perception and suggest the efficacy of multisensory training paradigms for improving second language pronunciation.

Acknowledgments

We appreciate the assistance of Dr. Ayşen Değer and Dr. Seda Altıner in the recruitment of students to conduct the pilot task and the experiment. We extend our gratitude to the external members of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra TFM–MLTA committee, as well as Dr. Sílvia Perpiñán, and Dr. Núria Esteve-Gibert. We would like to thank all participants for their effort and time. Also, we would like to thank Patrick Louis Rohrer for his time and help in generating the ideal training materials for the research. Finally, many thanks to all members of Grup d’Estudis de Prosòdia for providing additional information that helped us better structure the literature review section.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no (financial) conflict of interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript.

Notes

¹ In the few cases (N = 11) where speakers self-corrected, we took the corrected utterance as the target item to evaluate.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (MCIU), (AEI) and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) [grant number PGC2018-097007-B-l00], and Catalan government’s Agència de Gestió d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca (AGAUR) [grant number 2017 SGR_971]. The second author is supported for her PhD study by the Secretariat for Universities and Research of the Ministry of Business and Knowledge of the Government of Catalonia and the European Social Fund under the Grant for the recruitment of early-stage research staff [grant number 2020FI_B 00237].