非母语语音短期学习的年龄效应

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

采用短期人工训练的范式,选取没有任何朝鲜语经验的二年级儿童、五年级儿童和大学生为被试,以一对朝鲜语语音为材料,探讨非母语语音学习的年龄效应。被试分别在学习前和每天学习后完成语音分辨测查。结果发现:(1)汉语被试辨别朝鲜语紧音/k*/和松音/k/时存在困难;(2)在学习前,大学生的语音辨别正确率最高,五年级儿童次之,二年级儿童最低;(3)学习后,二年级儿童辨别成绩的提高量高于五年级儿童和大学生。该结果支持了学习非母语语音的年龄越小,学习效果越好、学习速度更快的假设。

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.