The effects of age of second language learning on the production of English vowels

This study examined the English vowel productions of 240 native speakers of Italian who had arrived in Canada at ages ranging from 2 to 23 years and 24 native English speakers from the same community. The productions of 11 vowels were rated for degree of foreign accent by 10 listeners. An increase i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied psycholinguistics 1996-07, Vol.17 (3), p.313-334
Main Authors: Munro, Murray J., Flege, James Emil, Mackay, Ian R. A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic Phonetics
Age
Analysis of Variance
Audiotape Recordings
Canada
English (Second Language)
Foreign Countries
Immigrants
Italian
Language Variation
Listening Comprehension
Native Speakers
Nonnative Speakers
Oral Language
Pronunciation
Second Language Learning
Stress (Phonology)
Vowels
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Summary:This study examined the English vowel productions of 240 native speakers of Italian who had arrived in Canada at ages ranging from 2 to 23 years and 24 native English speakers from the same community. The productions of 11 vowels were rated for degree of foreign accent by 10 listeners. An increase in perceived accentedness as a function of increasing age of arrival was observed on every vowel. Not one of the vowels was observed to be produced in a consistently native-like manner by the latest-arriving learners, even though they had been living in Canada for an average of 32 years. However, high intelligibility (percent correct identification) scores were obtained for the same set of productions. This was true even for English vowels that have no counterpart in Italian.
ISSN:0142-7164
1469-1817
DOI:10.1017/S0142716400007967