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Yanny or Laurel?: Proficiency and Perception #341

A certain ambiguous audio clip is perceived as “Laurel” by some listeners and as “Yanny” by others. For Japanese learners of English, could language proficiency be a factor affecting which word they hear? This poster shows the results of a study demonstrating that higher-proficiency Japanese learners of English are more likely to hear the phonetically-challenging “Laurel” than low-proficiency learners are.