Abstract-The aim of this study was to examine how earlier second language teaching affects Finnish school children's pronunciation of British English vowels. Two groups of Finnish children between the ages of eleven and thirteen were tested. The early learners studied in an English immersion class in a Finnish elementary school while the control group attended a regular Finnish speaking class at the same school. The task consisted of twenty three English stimulus words which included the twelve monophthong English target vowels in voiced and voiceless environments. The words were repeated seven times during the task. The participants produced the words after a native model and the target vowel qualities were then acoustically analysed. Statistical analysis revealed a group main effect. More specifically the analysis showed that the groups differed significantly in the way they produced target vowel second formant (F2) values. The F2 difference was only significant in the voiced context. Closer examination of the groups' vowel qualities revealed that the control group tended to produce the F2 values higher than the early learner group in most of the target vowels. The higher F2 values can be an indication of more frontal tongue position or less lip rounding during vowel production.Index Terms-children, vowel production, second language learning I. INTRODUCTIONWhen learning to produce a second language (L2) an individual can face various challenges depending on the similarities and differences between the sound systems of his or her mother tongue (L1) and the target language. According to second language learning theories, although completely new speech sounds are evidently challenging to learn, the most difficult L2 sounds to acquire are the ones which acoustically and motorically resemble L1 sounds. For example, the Speech Learning Model (SLM, (Flege, 1987;Flege, 1995)) and the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM, (Best, 1994)) state that L2 sounds that are similar to L1 sound categories are most likely to be assimilated to one or more L1 categories, thus causing maximal learning difficulties in the perception and production of L2 sounds. When an L2 sound is similar to an L1 category, the L2 sound is assimilated to, i.e. perceived as an exemplar of, an L1 sound category. This assimilation of L2 sounds causes the speaker to replace the difficult L2 sounds with similar L1 sounds, resulting in possible difficulties in communication. These difficulties continue until the speaker learns to perceive and thereafter produce the L2 contrasts that are irrelevant in his or her L1.Although L2 learning poses different challenges to speakers of all ages, previous research has provided evidence that children are, in fact, often faster and more successful L2 learners than adults. For example, Giannakopoulou et al. (2013) discovered that Greek children (7-8 years) showed more improvement in English phoneme identification and discrimination than Greek adults (20-30 years) after high-variability perceptual training. This suggests ...

The present study investigated children’s ability to learn to produce a non-native vowel contrast through a listen-and-repeat training method that is traditionally used in foreign language classrooms. Sixteen Finnish preschoolers (aged 6–7 years) were tested. The stimuli were two semi-synthetic pseudo words with the familiar vowel /y/ and the novel vowel /ʉ/ embedded in the first syllable. The procedure included four training and four recording sessions on two consecutive days. The vowels produced by the children were acoustically analyzed to obtain the average values of the first and second formant. The results showed that the participants changed their production of /ʉ/ towards the acoustic model after the first training and the change remained throughout the experiment. Our findings suggest 6–7-year-old children learn to produce a non-native vowel contrast even with limited L2 sound exposure in a listen-and-repeat training setting.

Earlier studies have shown that children are efficient second language learners. Research has also shown that musical background might affect second language learning. A two-day auditory training paradigm was used to investigate whether studying in a music-oriented education program affects children’s sensitivity to acquire a non-native vowel contrast. Training effects were measured with listen-and-repeat production tests. Two groups of monolingual Finnish children (9–11 years, N=23) attending music-oriented and regular fourth grades were tested. The stimuli were two semisynthetic pseudo words /ty:ti/ and /tʉ:ti/ with the native vowel /y/ and the non-native vowel /ʉ/ embedded. Both groups changed their pronunciation after the first training. The change was reflected in the second formant values of /ʉ/, which lowered significantly after three trainings. The results show that 9–11-year-old children benefit from passive auditory training in second language production learning regardless of whether or not they attend a music-oriented education program.

Children are known to be fast learners due to their neural plasticity. Learning a non-native language (L2) requires the mastering of new production patterns. In classroom settings, learners are not only exposed to the acoustic input, but also to the unfamiliar grapheme–phoneme correspondences of the L2 orthography. We tested how 9–10-year-old children, with Finnish as a native language (L1), respond to a two-day listen-and-repeat training paradigm, where they simultaneously hear acoustic stimuli and see orthographic cues. In the procedure, non-words containing the L2 vowel /ʉ/ were presented simultaneously with an orthographic cue showing <u>, guiding pronunciation towards the L1 vowel /u/ according to Finnish grapheme–phoneme correspondences. Earlier studies showed that Finnish adults rely on the orthographic cue over the acoustic one, leading them to produce /u/ instead of /ʉ/ when presented with the incongruent L1–L2 grapheme–phoneme correspondence (<u> – L1: /u/, L2: /ʉ/). Also, an earlier result from age-matched children receiving only acoustic input showed relatively fast pronunciation changes towards the target vowel. Our present results indicate clear and fast production learning of the non-native sound, and the misleading orthographic cue did not draw attention away from the target acoustic form. With orthographic cues, the participants learned to produce novel sounds faster than without them.

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