Højen, A. & Flege, J. E. (2006). Early learners’ discrimination of second-language vowels. Journal of Acoustic Society of America, 119 (5), 3072-3084.
Summary: Sally
This study investigated L2 vowel discrimination on early English learners with Spanish as their native language. A modified version of AXB test was used in order to prevent the participants from using lower level strategies to discern sounds. The performance of early learners was compared to that of monolinguals of English and Spanish, both with ISIs of 1000 ms and 0 ms. Results showed that early learners performed more like English monolinguals with their average perception scores significantly higher than those of Spanish monolinguals, who had trouble discerning difficult vowel contrasts. However, differences between English monolinguals and early learners still existed in that the latter had a hard time discerning the difference when the stimuli were of 0 ms ISI. The authors concluded that it is possible for our perceptual system to remain plastic and establish new phonetic categories in L2 learning. However, early learning is sufficient in guaranteeing full native-likeness.
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