What is molehvpt.org?

Our website, Multilingual Online Listening Exercises for HVPT (MOLEHVPT), allows teachers to incorporate high variability phonetic training (HVPT) exercises into their Spanish, French, and Japanese courses. 

In HVPT, learners hear words in multiple voices and practice identifying them against perceptually similar words. The variability inherent in different voices is theorized to help learners perceive novel sounds in a more target-like way.

Funded by the Spencer Foundation, our website is free to use!  Email hvpt.mole AT gmail to get started.

How does it work for teachers?

With a teacher account, you can:
  • create a course
  • choose which HVPT tasks, pretests, and posttests to include
  • invite students to the course
  • track students' completion of tasks and their scores
Materials:

What exercises are available for each language?

We currently have a range of difficult sound contrasts and sound-spelling correspondences for Spanish, French, and Japanese, as well as pretests and posttests that combine certain contrasts based on our research needs.  Options are presented in standard orthography (kana for the Japanese sound contrasts).  For more details and examples, consult this document.

Spanish

  • stress
  • /e/-/ei/
  • /ɾ/-/r/
  • /ɾ/-/d/
  • <g> vs. <h>
  • <j> vs. <h>
  • <l> vs. <ll>
  • <cu> vs. <qu>
  • <g> vs. <gu>
  • /s/-aspiration (regional feature, speakers from Argentina)
  • /s/ vs. /θ/ (regional feature, speakers from Spain)

French

  • /y/-/u/
  • /ɛ̃/-/ɑ̃/
  • /ɛ̃/-/ɔ̃/
  • /ɔ̃/-/ɑ̃/
  • /ɛ̃/-/ɑ̃/-/ɔ̃/
  • /ə/-/e/ (singular vs. plural)
  • ∅-/z/ (liaison, singular vs. plural)
  • /Ṽ/-/V/
  • /Ṽ/-/Vn/ (masculine vs. feminine)
  • <s> vs. <ss> (/s/-/z/)

Japanese

  • hiragana (all graphemes)
  • katakana (all graphemes)
  • /ts/-/s/
  • /ai/-/ae/
  • vowel length
  • consonant length
  • moraic nasals