Abstract
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.
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