Abstract
This study examined the identification of English consonants in noise
by native speakers of Italian. The effect of age of first exposure
to English was evaluated by comparing three groups of subjects who
continued to use Italian relatively often but differed according
to their age of arrival (AOA) in Canada from Italy (early: 7, mid:
14, late: 19 years). The subjects in the late group made more errors
identifying word-initial consonants than subjects in the early group
did; however, the effect of AOA was nonsignificant for word-final
stops. The effect of amount of native language (L1) use was evaluated
by comparing two groups of early bilinguals who were matched for
AOA (mean = 7 years) but differed according to self-reported percentage
use of Italian (early: 32\%, early-low: 8\%). The early bilinguals
who used Italian often (early) made significantly more errors identifying
word-initial and word-final consonants than native English (NE) subjects
did, whereas the early bilinguals who used Italian seldom (early-low)
did not differ from the NE subjects. The subjects' phonological short-term
memory was estimated by having them repeat Italian non-words. This
was done in an attempt to identify the source of individual differences.
The nonword repetition scores were in fact found to independently
account for 15\% of the variance in subjects' errors identifying
word-final English consonants and 8\% of the variance for word-initial
consonants.
- aged,phonetics,speech
- discrimination
- english,female,humans,italian,l2,language,male,middle
- perception,consonants,language
- tests,speech
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