Adults Show Initial Advantages Over Children in Learning Difficult Nonnative Speech Sounds.

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Speech-Language Pathology

Background:

• Children often demonstrate an advantage in acquiring nonnative speech sounds, with age of acquisition predicting second language success.
• It remains unclear if children utilize distinct or more efficient learning mechanisms compared to adults for language acquisition.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare children (10-16 years) and adults in learning a nonnative Hindi speech sound contrast.
• To investigate if younger participants exhibit superior baseline discriminability, learning, memory, or generalization of new sounds.
• To determine if phonological and auditory skills predict nonnative speech sound learning and if these relationships vary between age groups.

Main Methods:

• A comparative study design involving children (aged 10-16) and adults.
• Assessment of learning a nonnative Hindi speech sound contrast.
• Measurement of pretraining sensitivity, learning, retention after a delay, and generalization to a new talker.
• Collection of phonological and auditory skills data.

Main Results:

• Adults demonstrated superior pretraining sensitivity to the Hindi contrast, which predicted learning and retention.
• Children showed improvement after off-line consolidation and approached adult performance after an overnight delay.
• Perceptual skills predicting speech sound learning differed between children and adults, indicating distinct learning mechanisms.

Conclusions:

• The findings challenge the notion that children are inherently superior speech sound learners compared to adults.
• Children's apparent advantages might stem from different learning mechanisms or enhanced retention of nonnative speech contrasts.
• This research suggests a more nuanced understanding of age-related differences in second language phonological acquisition.