Project Description
Voice carry several cues about the owner of the voice. Human listeners process those cues automatically and instantaneously. As we hear a voice, we evaluate the talker’s age, sex, body size, ethnicity, emotional state, etc., regardless of our intention to do so. Such evaluation feeds our subsequent behavior, including that of learning a second language. Foreign language training material produced by multiple talkers has proven to be more effective than material produced by a single talker. When multiple talkers are adopted, the learners generalize their training to novel situations (e.g., novel talkers, novel words) better and the training effect lasts longer. A widely accepted theoretical accounting for such a benefit is that the training materials with multiple talkers provide high acoustic/phonetic variability, which leads to better learning. In this project, Dr. Park (Linguistics department) will investigate whether this theory still stands when listeners do not recognize multiple talkers in the multiple-talker material. Some voices sound similar to one another and some listeners are more sensitive to voice differences than others. Will such factors influence the degree of effectiveness of multiple-talker training materials? If so, the high acoustic/phonetic variability account should be revised. The main objective of this project is to test whether the training effects are better for the trainees who perceive different talkers in the training materials than for those who do not. This can be done by having two groups of native speakers of English learn Korean sound contrasts with different materials: one with 3 dissimilarly sounding talkers and the other with 3 similarly sounding talkers. The training effects of the two groups will be compared after 3 sessions of 20-minute trainings. The results from such a comparison will help us to test the proposal on the role of distinctive voices in learning sounds and words in a second language.
Tasks and Responsibilites
An undergraduate research assistant will be involved in all aspects of this project (e.g., recruiting participants for the experiment, running the experiment, collecting perception data, coding the data, etc.). Dr. Park will provide needed training for the project along with experienced UWM Phonetic lab members.
Desired Qualifications
None listed.