Perception of English phonetic contrasts by Dutch children: How bilingual are early-English learners?
The aim of this study was to investigate whether early-English education benefits the perception of English phonetic contrasts that are known to be perceptually confusable for Dutch native speakers, comparing Dutch pupils who were enrolled in an early-English programme at school from the age of four with pupils in a mainstream programme with English instruction from the age of 11, and English-Dutch early bilingual children. Children were 4-5-year-olds (start of primary school), 8-9-year-olds, or 11-12-year-olds (end of primary school). Children were tested on four contrasts that varied in diff... Mehr ...
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Dokumenttyp: | Artikel |
Erscheinungsdatum: | 2020 |
Reihe/Periodikum: | PLoS ONE, Vol 15, Iss 3, p e0229902 (2020) |
Verlag/Hrsg.: |
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
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Schlagwörter: | Medicine / R / Science / Q |
Sprache: | Englisch |
Permalink: | https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-26625987 |
Datenquelle: | BASE; Originalkatalog |
Powered By: | BASE |
Link(s) : | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0229902 |
The aim of this study was to investigate whether early-English education benefits the perception of English phonetic contrasts that are known to be perceptually confusable for Dutch native speakers, comparing Dutch pupils who were enrolled in an early-English programme at school from the age of four with pupils in a mainstream programme with English instruction from the age of 11, and English-Dutch early bilingual children. Children were 4-5-year-olds (start of primary school), 8-9-year-olds, or 11-12-year-olds (end of primary school). Children were tested on four contrasts that varied in difficulty: /b/-/s/ (easy), /k/-/ɡ/ (intermediate), /f/-/θ/ (difficult), /ɛ/-/æ/ (very difficult). Bilingual children outperformed the two other groups on all contrasts except /b/-/s/. Early-English pupils did not outperform mainstream pupils on any of the contrasts. This shows that early-English education as it is currently implemented is not beneficial for pupils' perception of non-native contrasts.