The Relationship between Perception and Production of Foreign Language Sequences

Suny At Stony Brook, Stony Brook NY

Investigators

Abstract

Learning a new language involves developing the abilities to hear and produce new sounds and sound sequences. This project will use the methodology of linguistics, psychology, and neurophysiology to determine why some foreign language structures are mastered more easily than others. The goals are to determine whether language learners? problems in pronunciation originate from errors of perception, and at what level of processing the perception errors occur. Two types of methodology will be employed: discrimination tasks, in which listeners judge two stimuli as the same or different; and ERP (event related potentials), which measure automatic responses of the auditory system to changes in auditory stimuli. This combination of methods will help to determine whether listeners actually fail to hear the acoustic differences that are crucial in distinguishing words in the foreign language but not in their native language, or do hear the differences but simply fail to categorize them correctly. This will be one of the first studies to investigate the relative perceptibility of foreign language sequences using both behavioral and neurophysiological probes. The findings will inform foreign language instruction, contributing to a better understanding of why some foreign structures are more difficult to master than others, why particular patterns of mispronunciation occur, and whether training in perception of foreign languages facilitates production. The findings will also have important implications for hypotheses concerning the plasticity of the neural structures responsible for language processing.