Adults can often improve their perception of novel phoneme contrasts with exposure to
a second language, but there is yet little understanding of how they accomplish
this. The primary aim of this study was to compare two types of evidence that
learners might use to learn the phonemes of second language: minimal pairs, or the
lexicon, and statistical information. It was found that adults show evidence of
perceptual learning based on statistical information alone, but that the
availability of minimal pairs leads to more accurate perception of a novel contrast.
In a follow-up experiment, it was found that adults can exhibit knowledge of a novel
contrast without yet being able to use the contrast to distinguish words in a
lexical task.
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