Training and Transfer of Word Identification: Foreign Language Speech Rate

This study examined effects of speech rate on the training and transfer of foreign language word identification. Speeds of initial training and test speech were varied, allowing for analysis of the relative effects of training difficulty and training specificity on a practical task-learning to map words to orthography in a new language. Participants were trained to identify words in Spanish sentences at one of 3 speech rates and tested at all 3 rates with new and old sentences. During training and testing, participants who learned at the fastest rate were less accurate at word segmentation than those who learned at medium and slow rates. There were no significant differences in segmentation accuracy between participants who trained at slow and medium speeds. Results do not support the difficulty of training principle but do support specificity of training for target words and grammatical structures although not for speech rate.