Amount of exposure and its effect on perception of second language front vowels in English

Abstract

Experience with a second language (L2) has been shown to positively affect learners’ perception of L2 sounds. However, few studies have focused on how the amount of L2 exposure in foreign language classrooms impacts perception of L2 sounds during the incipient stages of language learning in school-age children. To determine what effect, if any, the amount of L2 exposure has on perception, 64 students from a Spanish-English bilingual elementary school and 60 students from two non-bilingual elementary schools participated in an AX Categorical Discrimination task, which contained tokens of five English front vowels: /i ɪ e ɛ æ/. Results show that students from the bilingual school earned perception scores significantly higher than those earned by the students from the non-bilingual school (p = 0.002). However, an ANOVA found there to be no significant simple main effect for grade or significant correlation between grade level and school type. The bilingual school students perceived all within-category word pairings (e.g., bat-bat) significantly more accurately than the non-bilingual school students suggesting that increased, early exposure to an L2 may heighten one’s ability to disregard irrelevant, interpersonal phonetic differences and lead to a within-category perceptual advantage over those with less L2 exposure early on.