Psycholinguistic approaches to perception

While the acquisition of a second language has been extensively examined in the literature, many questions remain open with respect to the cognitive processes involved in phonetic learning. Our research project deals with the factors influencing the control of perception and production of foreign sounds by individuals. The acquisition of new ways of speech control is submitted to manipulable, extrinsic factors but also to intrinsic ones whose knowledge is relatively poor. Precisely, we aim at highlighting the cognitive processes contributing to the control of speech perception and production, namely attention and memory, using classical psycholinguistic tasks. As an example, in a previous study we addressed the effect of orienting attention (by providing information about the cues that were relevant for distinguishing the sounds and by giving feedback after each response) on the processing of unfamiliar speech sounds in a categorization task. Ultimately, our research program is designed to provide insights into controversial issues: the role of attention in learning, the potential role of feedback in regulating behavior and the relevance of implicit vs. explicit methods in phonetic training.