Multisensory teaching for second-language acquisition of voicing stop consonants

Integrating auditory, visual, and tactile cues

Bibliographic Data

ID22422272
AuthorsLi Jian (0000-0001-7544-5344, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics), Qi Zhang (0009-0000-5229-2496, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics), Zhijun Wang (0000-0002-7187-3031, Department of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Customs University, Shanghai, China, corresponding author)
Year2026
Publication date2026-06-05
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguage Teaching Research (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1362-1688 • E-ISSN: 1477-0954
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/13621688261443729
OpenAlexW7163679823
LanguageEN
References cited44

This study examines the effectiveness of a multisensory (audiovisual-tactile) intervention on Mandarin-speaking learners’ acquisition of French voiced stops. By integrating tactile self-feedback, adapted from the Tadoma method, into audiovisual instruction, we conducted a quasi-experimental study with pre- and posttest measures. Eighty-three French-novice Chinese university students were assigned to three groups: control (audio-only), experimental 1 (audiovisual), and experimental 2 (audiovisual-tactile). Perception was assessed via identification and discrimination tasks, and production was evaluated through word-reading and picture-naming tasks, with acoustic analysis focusing on voice onset time. Results revealed that audiovisual input did not outperform audio-only instruction for perception or production accuracy and may have impeded fine-grained discrimination. In contrast, the audiovisual-tactile group achieved significantly superior production accuracy, characterized by nativelike voice onset time values and reduced positive voice onset times, alongside stable perception gains. These findings highlight the potential of tactile feedback to reinforce articulatory precision, offering actionable insights for multisensory pedagogy in second language pronunciation teaching.

Perception · Pronunciation · Speech perception · Speech production · Teaching method · Voice · Voice-onset time · Hearing Impairment and Communication · Multisensory perception and integration · Phonetics and Phonology Research

Tools

Open DOI