Novel Sound Category Formation with Bimodal Distributions
Summary
This study explores how adults learn to hear unfamiliar speech sounds. By examining how different kinds of listening experience affect what people notice and learn, we hope to better understand how new speech categories are formed and how learning transfers to new sounds. The findings may contribute to research on speech perception and language learning and could eventually help inform approaches to second-language listening and pronunciation training.
The study will take place in the Phonetics Lab (EDC 259) and will involve listening to speech sounds and completing perception tasks, along with a very short English word production task. The study will take place over two days (consecutive days): approximately 50 minutes on Day 1 and approximately 60 minutes on Day 2. Participants will receive a total of CAD 20 for their participation.
Eligibility
Eligible ages: 18 to 45
Accepts healthy participants: Yes
Inclusion criteria:
1. 18 years of age or older.
2. A native or highly proficient speaker of English who learned English from early childhood.
3. Able to complete both study sessions and follow instructions in English.
4. Meet the study’s language-background criteria based on the brief screening questionnaire:
Please complete the background questionnaire using this link: https://www.sarcastirony.ca/students/screening/
Exclusion criteria:
Native English speakers with no extensive experience with or exposure to Bengali or other languages that systematically use four-way stop contrasts (e.g., Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi, or Nepali).
If you have experience with languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Polish, or Hungarian etc, you may still sign up and complete the questionnaire if you consider your proficiency in those languages to be very low.
If you are unsure about your language background, please complete the background questionnaire.
Participate
Fill out the following form if you want to participate in this research
UCalgary Notice of Collection
The University of Calgary (UCalgary) respects your privacy and is
committed to ensuring the privacy of all students, staff, and community members. Your personal information is being
collected under the authority of section 4(c) of the Protection of Privacy Act (POPA). It will be collected, used
and disclosed for the purposes outlined in UCalgary’s
Notice of
Collection, Use and Disclosure of Personal Information and managed in accordance with UCalgary’s
Privacy
Management Program.
Your personal information may be input into automated systems to generate content or make decisions,
recommendations, or predictions. If you have questions regarding this notice or UCalgary’s collection,
use, or disclosure of your personal information, please contact
accessandprivacy@ucalgary.ca.
Additional information
Contact information
syed.alam1@ucalgary.ca
Principal investigator:
Stephen Winters
Clinical trial:
No
REB-ID:
REB25-1613
External links