Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Different hypotheses were proposed concerning the role oftalker variability in lexical learning. It remains unclearwhether new phonetic categories are acquired as episodicmemory traces with talkers’ voice information preserved or asabstract categories. The current study investigated the role ofvoice similarity in perceptual learning of Cantonese tones. Sixhigh-variability training sessions were given to 12 Mandarinspeakers. Voice similarity was controlled in the training andpre-and posttests. Results indicate that the training positivelytransferred to both similar and dissimilar talkers. However, inthe pretest, the performance was not significantly differentbetween similar and dissimilar voices, whereas significantbetter performance was found in the similar voices in theposttest. These results suggest that learners retained speakers’information in the learning process and made use of suchinformation for future perception. This implies that lexicaltones are probably encoded episodically in the mentalrepresentation of Mandarin L2 learners.