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Article published In: Journal of Second Language Pronunciation
Vol. 11:3 (2025) ► pp.312–337

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The effect of oral repetition during discrimination training on L2 perceptual learning

ORCiD logo with link | The Australian National University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with the Australian National University.

Published online: 18 August 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jslp.24014.ued
Abstract
Understanding how production and perception interact in second language (L2) phonetic learning remains an open question, with conflicting evidence about the role of production in perceptual training. This study investigates the effects of the timing of production during discrimination training on learning the English /l/–/r/ contrast. Forty-six Japanese learners of English were assigned to one of three training groups: Production-first group, where participants repeated a stimulus before answering a perceptual question; Production-last group, where participants repeated a stimulus after answering a perceptual question; and Perception-only group, where no production was involved. All groups completed a discrimination task before and after training. Results revealed that the Perception-only and Production-first groups significantly improved discrimination accuracy while the Production-last group did not. These findings suggest that although repeating a stimulus during discrimination training does not always disrupt learning, perception-only training consistently brings about better learning outcomes in L2 perception.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Perception-only training
    • 2.2Perception-and-production-mixed training
    • 2.3Current study
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Materials
    • 3.3Procedure
      • 3.3.1Phonetic training
      • 3.3.2Discrimination task pre- and post-test
    • 3.4Statistical analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Discrimination tasks
      • 4.1.1Descriptive statistics
    • 4.2Inferential statistics
    • 4.3Summary
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1The effect of perception-only training
    • 5.2The effect of production during perception-only training
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
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