This model was used to subjectively and objectively assess consonant discrimination in commercial and experimental coding strategies.
The experiment was divided into two parts, testing vowel and consonant discrimination separately, each using ten subjects.
In the first task, called the final consonant discrimination task, participants completed an auditory discrimination task that required speech sound segmentation.
Rodriguez-Fornells et al. (2002) conducted a go/no-go vowel-consonant discrimination task in which bilinguals had to ignore pseudowords and words of the nontarget language.
Therefore, within the N1 range, lexical categorization focus may affect word versus consonant string discrimination but not word versus pronounceable pseudoword discrimination.
No significant main effects or interactions were obtained, i.e., the two groups did not differ in rate of processing during early consonant change discrimination.
First, the two groups of nonword-repeaters had similar early consonant change discrimination abilities as indicated by the MMN response i.e., accuracy of early encoding of incoming auditory information was similar between the groups.
Using this method, it has been shown that such cross-language mapping patterns (henceforth referred to as cross-mapping patterns) can predict L2 consonant and vowel discrimination accuracy (Best, Faber, & Levitt 1996; Guion, Flege, Akahane-Yamada, & Pruitt, 2000; Polka, 1995).
For instance, in a previous study (Cattaneo et al., 2008) using the priming paradigm, an occipital single TMS pulse had only facilitated letter (consonant vs. vowel) discrimination for unprimed letters but TMS had no effect on primed letters.
With the consonant stressing function, the discrimination of Japanese consonants was significantly improved, in particular in voiceless consonant /s/, voiced consonant /b/, fricative consonants /g/ and /z/, bound consonant /r/ and semi-vowels /w/ and /y/.
Separate runs tested discrimination of rotated consonant and vowel pairs, each using 10 subjects; the stimuli within each trial of a single run differed only by a consonant or a vowel respectively (see Materials and Methods).
