Childhood language exposure: Does early experience affect sound perception and production in speakers with reduced language proficiency?

Abstract

Early language exposure is crucial for acquiring native mastery of the phonology of a language (Fromkin 1974, Flege 1987, Antoniou et al. 2015). It is not clear, however, whether early language exposure has lasting benefits when the quantity and quality of speaking drop dramatically after childhood (Oh et al. 2003). In this study, we investigate the production of Arabic speech sounds in 20 native speakers (who heard and spoke Arabic during childhood regularly), 20 childhood speakers (who heard Arabic regularly during childhood but did not speak it regularly afterwards), and 20 novice speakers (did not have any exposure to Arabic during childhood but are currently enrolled in Arabic language classes). The experiment includes a language proficiency test and a phoneme production and perception task. The target sounds are geminate consonants. The acoustic analysis consists of manual alignment of each consonant, and extracting their duration and acoustic information (voicing, aspiration, and formant values). The findings shed more light on whether early language experience has measurable long-term benefits for an individual's phonetic and phonological skill even if the language experience diminishes over time. In addition, we gain further insight into the role played by universal markedness factors in L2 acquisition (Davidson, 2011).