The 2021-2022 colloquium series continues on Monday, January 24, with a talk by Melissa Baese-Berk (University of Oregon), held via Zoom from 3:10-5pm. The talk is entitled "Factors influencing non-native perception and learning," and the abstract is as follows:
Learning a second language is a complex task, requiring acquisition of syntactic structure, lexical items, and phonological structure, among other things. Speech perception and learning phonological categories are notoriously difficult for non-native speakers because sensitivity to non-native contrasts by adult listeners is typically quite poor. Previous research has hypothesized that a relationship between the structure of the first and second languages predicts perception and acquisition of contrasts in the second language. My research examines a number of other factors that may influence perception and learning of non-native contrasts. The work I will present addresses several factors including: the relationship between perception and production during learning and how this relationship might shift both over time and across contrasts, the role of variability during training, and the role of active vs. passive exposures during training. I will discuss the implications of the results of these studies for our understanding of speech perception and production more broadly.