Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

High-Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) has been shown tobe effective in improving the perception of even the hardestsecond-language (L2) contrasts. However, little is known as towhether such training can improve phonological processing atthe lexical level. The present study tested whether this type oftraining also improves word recognition. Adult proficientFrench late learners of English completed eight online sessionsof HVPT on the perception of English word-initial /h/. Thissound does not exist in French and has been shown to bedifficult to process by French listeners both on the prelexical(Mah, Goad & Steinhauer, 2016) and the lexical level (Melnik& Peperkamp, 2019). In pretest and posttest participantscompleted an identification task as well as a lexical decisiontask. The results demonstrated that after training the learners’accuracy had improved in both tasks. The theoretical andapplied implications are discussed.