Does early foreign language learning in school affect phonemic discrimination in adulthood?

Abstract

Long-term effects of early foreign language learning with a few hours’ classroom contact per week on speech perception are controversial: some studies show age effects of minimal English input in childhood on phonemic perception in adulthood, but others don’t (e.g., Lin et al., 2004). This study investigated effects of a younger starting age in a situation of minimal exposure on perception of English consonants under noise conditions. The listeners were two groups of Japanese university students: early learners (n = 21) who started studying English in kindergarten or elementary school, and late learners (n = 24) who began to study in junior high school. The selected target phonemes were word-medial approximants (/l, r/). Each nonword (i.e., ala, ara), produced by six native talkers, was combined with speech babble at the signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of 8 dB (medium noise) and 0 dB (quite high noise for L2 listeners). A discrimination test was given in the ABX format. Results showed that the late learners discriminated /l/ and /r/ better than the early learners regardless of the noise conditions and talker differences (p < 0.05). A multiple regression analysis revealed that length of learning and English use could contribute to their discrimination ability.