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J Psycholinguist Res (2007) 36:1523 DOI 10.1007/s10936-006-9030-y
ORIGINAL PAPER
The Effect of Language Immersion Education on the Preattentive Perception of Native and Non-native Vowel Contrasts
Maija S. Peltola Outi Tuomainen Mira Koskinen Olli Aaltonen
Published online: 16 November 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2006
Abstract Prociency in a second language (L2) may depend upon the age of exposure and the continued use of the mother tongue (L1) during L2 acquisition. The effect of early L2 exposure on the preattentive perception of native and non-native vowel contrasts was studied by measuring the mismatch negativity (MMN) response from 14-year-old children. The test group consisted of six Finnish children who had participated in English immersion education. The control group consisted of eight monolingual Finns. The subjects were presented with Finnish and English synthetic vowel contrasts. The aim was to see whether early exposure had resulted in the development of a new language-specic memory trace for the contrast phonemically irrelevant in L1. The results indicated that only the contrast with the largest acoustic distance elicited an MMN response in the Bilingual group, while the Monolingual group showed a response also to the native contrast. This may suggest that native-like memory traces for prototypical vowels were not formed in early language immersion.
Keywords Discrimination Perception Even-related potentials Language learning
Introduction
The perception of native speech sounds seems to be highly automatic and based on preattentive acoustic and phonetic processing in which both auditory sensory memory and language-specic phoneme representations are involved (Ntnen et al., 1997;
M. S. Peltola (B) O. Tuomainen M. Koskinen O. Aaltonen Department of Phonetics, University of Turku, Assistentinkatu 7 (CCN, Publicum), Turku 20014, Finlande-mail: maija.peltola@utu.
M. S. Peltola O. AaltonenCentre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Turku, Assistentinkatu 7 (CCN, Publicum), Turku 20014, Finland
16 J Psycholinguist Res (2007) 36:1523
Winkler et al., 1999b). These phonetic memory traces are formed in early infancy (Cheour et al., 1998) and perhaps even during infant sleep (Cheour et al., 2002a). The effects of language-specic representations have been shown in several behavioral studies reporting that while infants can equally accurately discriminate speech sounds of any language, this ability is weakened already by the age of 612 months when speech sounds are perceived in accordance with the mother tongue system (Kuhl, Williams,...