Auditory Advantages of Young Learners Over Adults

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to scientifically investigate the superior auditory advantage of children over adults. Experts in language teaching and acquisition have contended diverse rationales for these perceived advantages of children in acquiring pronunciation of a second language. Some delineate that infants discriminate certain contrasts better than adults from the same language community. However, only few of their arguments have scientifically proven children’s superiority, especially their auditory capability, which is the foundation of perception. To extend this line of scientific inquiry, the researcher examined the auditory abilities of two groups of Korean students (kindergarten and university) for their auditory capability, using ultrasonic ringtones that play at a higher frequency than normal tones from the internet (http://www.ultrasonicringtones.com). In a medical context, ultrasonic sounds are commonly used for checking human auditory capabilities with precision (Kim, 2009). This experiment results show that the auditory ability of kindergarten children is significantly better than that of college students. Among many factors, these results suggest that young learners’ advantage in acquiring second language pronunciation may be auditory, since good auditory and listening ability works as a blueprint for speaking, especially pronunciation.