The perceptual development of a British-English phoneme contrast in Dutch adults

How does the perception of a new phoneme contrast develop? In answering this question we consider two hypotheses: i) Acquired Distinctiveness: before learning, differences between and within phoneme categories are hardly discriminable. Through training, the phoneme boundary is learnt. ii) Acquired Similarity: before learning, differences between and within phoneme categories are well discriminated. Through training, only the phoneme boundary remains discriminable. In a pretest-training-posttest design, Dutch adults learnt the British- English pseudowords thif and sif: the first consonant in th... Mehr ...