Does training on a phonemic contrast absent in the listener’s dialect influence word recognition?

Abstract

Southern French listeners were trained on the word final Standard French /e/-/ɛ/ contrast that does not exist in their dialect. They learned to associate minimal pairs of new words with visual shapes. Although final training session performance was relatively high, the learning did not transfer to a lexical decision task with phonological priming. Thus successful training on a phonemic contrast did not guarantee the efficient use of this contrast in spoken word recognition tasks. These findings are discussed in light of abstractionist and exemplarist models.