Beschreibung:
<jats:p>Former studies investigated that word recognition by L2 learners is affected by both acoustic and semantic contexts [Rothwell and Akahane-Yamada, J. Acout. Soc. Am. 112, 2386 (2002)]. It was also shown that these two context effects lead to different achievement in perception training [Ikuma and Akahane-Yamada, J. Acout. Soc. Am. 115, 2393 (2004)]. In this study, native speakers of Japanese were trained to identify English /r/ and /l/ within words or sentences. L2 proficiency level for each trainee was also measured by a short written test regarding vocabulary and grammar. Results showed that training with semantically contextual stimuli improved the identification accuracy for stimuli with semantically contextual cues, but not for stimuli without semantic cues. Furthermore, the L2 proficiency level correlated only with the improvement in identification accuracy of target phonemes embedded in the semantically contextual sentences. These results suggest that L2 learners tend to use semantic cues rather than difficult acoustic cues. However, semantic context may moderate the effect of auditory perception training. Thus, training with semantically neutral stimulus is necessary to improve perception ability even for high proficiency level learners. [Work supported by JSPS.]</jats:p>