Enhanced plasticity in spoken language acquisition for child learners: Evidence from phonetic training studies in child and adult learners of English

Giannakopoulou, Anastasia; Uther, Maria; Ylinen, Sari

doi:10.1177/0265659012467473

Cited by 32 publications

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“…These results suggest that children are able to learn to discriminate a difficult sound contrast fast and the learning effect can be seen in production as well as in the preattentive perceptual tasks. A more recent study by Giannakopoulou et al (2013) also gives strong evidence on children's motor plasticity compared to adults. In their study Greek participants trained on perceptual identification and discrimination of the English tense /ɩ :/ and lax /ɪ / using high-variability training.…”

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confidence: 90%

Children Learning a Non-native Vowel – The Effect of a Two-day Production Training

Taimi¹,

Jähi²,

Alku³

et al. 2014

JLTR

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Abstract-The aim of this study was to investigate, how young children learn to produce a non-native vowel embedded in a pseudo-word context after short and intensive listen-and-repeat training sessions. The trained vowel contrast was chosen so that it would generate maximal learning difficulties according to models of second language learning. The group consisted of 13 7-10 year old girls. The child subjects participated in the study twice, on two consecutive days. Both days consisted of two training and two recording sessions. The model stimuli were pseudo-words /ty:ti/ and /tʉ :ti/, synthesized using a semi-synthetic method. The primary target word was /tʉ :ti/, which contained the vowel phoneme phonologically irrelevant in Finnish. The two lowest formants and the fundamental frequency were analysed from the recorded vowels. The results revealed that children learned to produce the new vowel after only three training sessions and that the effect was also seen after the fourth session. These results suggest that children learn to produce a new vowel after a short period of phonetic training.

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confidence: 90%

Children Learning a Non-native Vowel – The Effect of a Two-day Production Training

Taimi¹,

Jähi²,

Alku³

et al. 2014

JLTR

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“…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 an enhanced plasticity for L2 learning in childhood.…”

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Finnish Children Producing English Vowels — Studying in an English Immersion Class Affects Vowel Production

Immonen

Peltola

2018

JLTR

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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 ...

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“…We also expected that children would show greater increases in performance than adults, at least in the training and discrimination tasks, given the findings of Giannakopoulou et al (2013a). Again this was not seen in the data.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

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Supplemental Information 3: S3 Table. Analyses With the Control Variable “Talker”

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Background. High talker variability (i.e. multiple voices in the input) has been found effective in training non-native phonetic contrasts in adults. A small number of studies suggest that children also benefit from high-variability phonetic training with some evidence that they show greater learning (more plasticity) than adults given matched input, although results are mixed. However no study has directly compared the effectiveness of high versus low talker variability in children. Methods. Native Greek speaking 8-year-olds (N=52), and adults (N=41) were exposed to the English /i/-/ɪ/ contrast in ten training sessions through a computerized word learning game. Pre-and posttraining tests examined discrimination of the contrast as well as lexical learning. Participants were randomly assigned to high (4 talkers) or low (1 talker) variability training conditions. Results. Both age groups improved during training, and both improved more while trained with a single talker. Results of a 3-interval oddity discrimination test did not show the predicted benefit of high-variability in training in either age group. Instead, children showed an effect in the reverse direction-i.e. reliably greater improvements in discrimination following single talker training, even for untrained generalization items, although the result is qualified by (accidental) differences in participant groups at pre-test. Adults showed a numeric advantage for high-variability but were inconsistent with respect to voice and word novelty. In addition, no effect of variability was found for lexical learning. There was no evidence of greater plasticity for phonetic learning in child learners. Discussion. This paper adds to the handful of studies demonstrating that, like adults, child learners can improve their discrimination of a phonetic contrast via computerized training. There was no evidence of a benefit of training with multiple talkers, either for discrimination or word learning. The results also do not support the findings of greater plasticity in child learning found in a previous paper (Giannakopoulou et al., 2013a). We discuss these results in terms of various differences between training and test tasks used in the current work compared with previous literature.

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Enhanced plasticity in spoken language acquisition for child learners: Evidence from phonetic training studies in child and adult learners of English

Cited by 32 publications

References 32 publications

Children Learning a Non-native Vowel – The Effect of a Two-day Production Training

Children Learning a Non-native Vowel – The Effect of a Two-day Production Training

Finnish Children Producing English Vowels — Studying in an English Immersion Class Affects Vowel Production

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