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Article published In:
Journal of Second Language Pronunciation
Vol. 5:3 (2019) ► pp.374–401

Children’s and adults’ initial phonological acquisition of a foreign language

ORCID logo | University of Münster
| University of Münster
| University of Münster

This study compared children’s and adults’ L2 perception and production in the first hours of exposure to a foreign language. A total of 10 German children and 19 German adults performed a phoneme discrimination task and a sentence imitation task in Polish at two testing times. Exposed to a comparable input, the adult learners were found to perceive Polish sibilant contrasts more accurately than their child counterparts and to maintain this advantage over a two-week-long instruction. However, the two groups did not differ in their developing ability to produce the tested sibilants. A great deal of inter- and intra-individual differences in both learner groups was also attested. Our findings suggest that young L2 instructed learners are not necessarily better and/or faster perceivers and producers of novel language sounds than adult L2 instructed learners, who are able to discriminate a range of novel sibilant pairs even after very limited L2 exposure.

Keywords: L2 speech perception, L2 speech production, child-adult differences, L2 phonological development, foreign language instruction, controlled input
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Phonological acquisition of a foreign language by children and adults
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Teaching
    • 3.3Data
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Learner group characteristics
    • 4.2Phoneme discrimination
    • 4.3Sentence imitation task
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 25 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jslp.18033.kop
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