The Role of Individual Differences in Attention and Working-Memory in Learning a Nonnative Phoneme Category

Speech perception is characterized by categorical perception of phonemes. Certain speech sounds varying along the continuous acoustic dimension known as voice onset time (VOT) are perceived as either voiced /b/ or unvoiced /p/ phonemes by English listeners. A third VOT prevoiced /ph/ phoneme category is used in Thai and is indistinct from the /b/ category in English. Some listeners can learn to perceive speech sounds belonging this third VOT category with a small amount of training. The cognitive mechanisms underlying the variation in individualsʼ ability to perceive the prevoiced /ph/ phoneme are not well understood. The current experiment investigated the role of attention and working-memory in facilitating listeners’ ability to learn to perceive the prevoiced /ph/ phoneme. A consistent relationship between attentional and working-memory measures and prevoiced perceptual learning was not found. Musical ability was a good predictor of performance on a prevoiced phoneme identification task.