Perception of nonnative sounds: methodological issues and the use of Praat and TP software

Abstract

This paper aims at providing researchers with information about some methodological procedures to develop perception tests and perceptual training tasks. After presenting a brief explanation about identification and discrimination tests, the paper shows how to design a perceptual test in two different free applications: Praat and TP. Although Praat is an excellent tool to design perceptual experiments, it might not be a user-friendly software for researchers who are not comfortable with programming and/or the technical English language used in its manual. As an alternative, TP was designed to provide users with a software to test/train (audio and audiovisual) perception that gives immediate feedback and whose intuitive configuration follows the structure adopted in Microsoft Windows apps.