Effects of audio‐visual presentation of target words in word translation training

Komaki and Akahane‐Yamada (Proc. ICA2004) used 2AFC translation task in vocabulary training, in which the target word is presented visually in orthographic form of one language, and the appropriate meaning in another language has to be chosen between two choices. Present paper examined the effect of audio‐visual presentation of target word when native speakers of Japanese learn to translate English words into Japanese. Pairs of English words contrasted in several phonemic distinctions (e.g., /r/–/l/, /b/–/v/, etc.) were used as word materials, and presented in three conditions; visual‐only (V), audio‐only (A), and audio‐visual (AV) presentations. Identification accuracy of those words produced by two talkers was also assessed. During pretest, the accuracy for A stimuli was lowest, implying that insufficient translation ability and listening ability interact with each other when aurally presented word has to be translated. However, there was no difference in accuracy between V and AV stimuli, suggesting th...