Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Ability To Discriminate And Pronounce Foreign Language Phonemes As A Function Of Age, Maria J. Correa

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

Fifty native English speakers (ages: 3, 9, 11 and adults) were asked to discriminate and pronounce Spanish words. The Wepman Auditory Discrimination Test was administered to the subjects to assess their discrimination abilities in their native language. A training session using English pairs of words showed that five-year-olds improved in their discrimination abilities after training but three-year-olds did not. Pronunciation was scored by two native Spanish speakers. Analyses revealed that older subjects pronounced the Spanish words significantly better than did younger subjects. Similar results were obtained for the analyses of Spanish phoneme pronunciation. Moreover, analyses of discrimination abilities on the …