Training Chinese speakers to perceive English /nl

Native speakers of some southern Chinese dialects have difficulty perceptually differentiating English /n l /. In this study, five native Chinese subjects participated in a training experiment designed to increase perception of the /n/-/l/ contrast using a fading technique [D. Jamieson and D. Morosan, Percept. Psychophys. 40, 205–215 (1986)]. Stimuli consisted of initial /n/ and /l/ words produced by four native English speakers in which the initial consonants were increased by varying amounts. Subjects were first trained on the longest exemplars, and progressed to the natural versions. Both discrimination and identification training sets were used along with immediate feedback. Pre- and post-training perception generalization and production data were obtained. Results and implications will be discussed.