ABSTRACT
Visual cues from a talker’s face facilitate identification of sounds for many people, including second language (L2) learners. This study investigated the effects of contextual and visual cues on spoken word identification for L2 learners (72 L1 Japanese, 88 L1 Korean) of English and 66 native speakers, focusing on the increased salience of visual cues following perception training. Learners’ perception training with feedback involved /p/-/f/ and /r/-/l/ minimal pairs. Audio visual (AV) groups received AV training; others received Audio only. Results demonstrated significant improvement in identification accuracy following training, especially for AV groups. Both sentence context and the temporal precedence of articulatory gestures can serve priming roles in reducing the initial cohort of word candidates. For learners, the salience of visual cues was enhanced through focused training; however, the effects of contextual and visual cues remained independent and may have competed for attention across trials and participants.
