Psychological Development and Education ›› 2008, Vol. 24 ›› Issue (3): 89-93.

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Age Effect on a Short-Term Training in Discriminating a Non-Native Phonemic Contrast

MEI Lei-Lei1, LI Yan-Fang1, HUANG Shi-Zhi1, XUE Gui2, CHEN Chuan-Sheng3, DONG Qi1   

  1. 1. State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875;
    2. Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles 90089-1061;
    3. Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine, Irvine 92697-7085
  • Online:2008-07-15 Published:2008-07-15

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Abstract: Two-grade and five-grade primary school students and undergraduates,who didn't have any formal knowledge of Korean language,were chosen as subjects to investigate age effect on non-native phoneme learning.They received a short-term training in discriminating a Korean phonetic contrast and were tested on the phoneme discrimination task before training and after each training day.Results showed that: (1) Chinese subjects had significant difficulties in discriminating Korean tense consonant /k*/ and lax consonant /k/; (2) At the pre-training stage,adults performed better than children in the phoneme discrimination task; (3) After training,the younger children gained more improvements than the elder children and adults.These results confirm the hypothesis that the younger the learners are,the better and faster they will be at learning the phonology of a new language.

Key words: second language, phonological learning, age effect, training

CLC Number: 

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