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Gamified High Variability Phonetic Training for Advanced L2 Learners
Poster Session D, Thursday, October 1, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
Begoña Pericas1, Vita Kogan2; 1Univeristy College London, 2University of Lisbon
High variability phonetic training (HVPT) paradigms have been shown to help adult learners improve their perception of difficult second language (L2) phonemes. Nevertheless, traditional HVPT paradigms do not mirror real-world L2 learning and in recent years, researchers have strived to develop paradigms that provide feedback as well as multimodal learning opportunities that resemble real-world interactions with an L2. Moreover, gamifying these tasks has made them more engaging. However, most HVPT studies track phonetic learning gains with tasks that involve other cognitive, and non-language related abilities, which constrain the observed learning gains by participant’s cognitive abilities. The current study trained 15 Portuguese native advanced learners of English with the HVPT game AudioLines, and tracked their learning using the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) response of electroencephalography (EEG) recordings, in a passive-listening task. AudioLines includes three American-English phonetic contrasts: two difficult ones (i.e., /i/ – /ɪ/ and /æ/ – /ɛ/) and an easy control (i.e. /ʌ/ – /u/), to balance the game’s difficulty. In each round, players see bubbles on a grid, which they have to reposition based on their associated minimal-pair words. When three same-word bubbles are grouped together, they disappeared and the aim is to clear the grid. As a result, AudioLines provides a learning paradigm with continuous feedback that is contingent on the player’s actions and is reflected in changes to the game state. Moreover, it requires players to integrate their phoneme representations with visuospatial planning and motor actions, making the learning experience more similar to real-world L2 learning than traditional lab-based tasks. Participants played AudioLines for two weeks and took part in a pre- and a post-training EEG session, where their MMN responses to the /i/ – /ɪ/ and /æ/ – /ɛ/ contrasts were recorded. These contrasts are known to be difficult for Portuguese speakers because European Portuguese does not phonemically distinguish vowels within the high front (/i/–/ɪ/) and mid-to-low front (/ɛ/–/æ/) regions, mapping both contrasts onto a single L1 category. Results revealed that, for the /i/ – /ɪ/ contrast, MMN magnitudes were significantly larger at post-test than at pre-test. Meaning that training rearranged our participants’ pre-attentive perceptual space for /i/ – /ɪ/. Nevertheless, no significant differences in MMN magnitudes were observed between pre- and post-test for the /æ/ – /ɛ/ contrast, indicating lower perceptual improvement from pre- to post-test. Taken together, these findings show that the degree of learning in adult, gamified HVPT paradigms can be measured using MMN responses, offering an assessment that is less constrained by participants’ cognitive demands than traditional behavioural tasks.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception, Multilingualism