Assessing phonetic talent through speech production measurements: an exploratory study

This study is part of a broader project investigating the processes involved in the acquisition of new phonetic control regimes in second language (L2) learning. In the project, we test in the laboratory several ways of implementing phonetic training that are inspired by didactic techniques reported to be efficient in L2 classrooms. One of them is 'adapted pronunciation', in which learners are asked
to repeat sounds in which gestures of interest are overshot with respect to the actual target. A first experiment revealed that adapted pronunciation did increase performances when native Belgian
French speakers were asked to reproduce long (English-like) VOTs (Delvaux et al., 2008).
However, a large amount of inter-individual variation was observed, even though the participants were matched in linguistic experience (Huet et al., 2009 ; Piccaluga et al., in press).