Abstract
AbstractFricatives, by definition, produce turbulence, and in fricative-rich languages such as English the cues which distinguish them are rather subtle. In addition, developmentally they occur late in children's productions and appear to be relatively difficult for infants to perceive. Thus discrimination of the array of English fricatives would appear to pose particular problems for L2 learners from an L1 background such as Thai, which has relatively few fricatives. In this study, native Thai speakers, Thais learning English as an L2, and native English speakers in three age-groups, 6 years, 8 years and adults, were tested for their perceptual discrimination of English voiceless fricative contrasts ([∫]-[θ], [∫]-[f], [∫]-[s], [s]-[θ], [f]-[θ], and [s]-[f]).Generally speaking, English speakers performed better than Thai-English speakers and they better than Thai-only speakers. More importantly Thai and Thai-English speakers' comparative discrimination ability for the six fricative contrasts more closely ...
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