The Effect of an Enriched Visual Context on Learning L2 Speech Sounds

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Issue Date
2015-06-26
Language
en
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Abstract
The goal of this project was to find out whether we can improve the performance of people engaging in a phoneme learning task. The focus in this experiment was on the English vowel pair /æ/ and /ε/ as this distinction is difficult to learn for Dutch native speakers. It has been shown that contextual information, such as world knowledge, is used to learn vocabulary. It is also known that visual information can have a big influence on auditory perception. Because of this we tried to find out if adding an enriched visual context to a phoneme learning task can help to improve the performance of the participants on this task. This extra visual information might help the participant to better integrate the phonemes by making it possible for the new auditory information to form contextual connections with the extra visual information. The results showed that the participants in general got better at identifying the phonemes. The effect of adding the enriched visual context compared to simple orthography was not significant. However the effect was strong, suggesting that the size of the group of participants might be the reason that it was not significant.
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen