The SRL lab meeting this week will hear a presentation from IU's own Professor James Miller. The title and abstract for his talk are given below, along with a few references for more information; all are invited and welcome to attend.
Friday, February 27
1:30 - 3:00 p.m.
Psychology Building 128
James D. Miller, Ph.D.
Principal Scientist
Communication Disorders Technology, Inc.
The Speech Perception Assessment Training System (SPATS) was originally developed for the Hearing Impaired. Based on experience with 80 ESL-learners with 12 different L1's, SPATS has been modified to meet their needs and is called SPATS-ESL. SPATS-ESL will be described and results from 30 ESL-learners, who used the system near the end of its evolution will be described. All participants had TOEFL scores (pbt) near or well above 500 and had significant perceptual problems prior to training. All improved in proportion to the time spent with SPATS-ESL. The order of difficulty appears to be syllable nuclei, syllable codas, syllable onsets, and sentences. As a whole, the results are consistent with the notion that near-native speech perception can be achieved with 20-30 hours of training, (administered in 20-90 minute doses) with SPATS-ESL. A caveat is that a few ESL-learners may require more time to master the extended vowel system used in SPATS-ESL. The lecture will include the author's musings on the basics of perceptual learning, what is involved in learning a new phonetic system, the nature of lexical access, and the "comprehension" method of second-language instruction touted in the 1970's.
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