The purpose of this study was to investigate the question of age in relation to second language learning aptitude. Foreign language proficiency involves many skills; two of these skills are listening and speaking. This study tested an aspect of listening, auditory discrimination, and an aspect of speaking, oral production. Both tests were given to a group of children and a group of adults to determine if both tests taken together would show one group to have a higher foreign language aptitude than the other group.Both tests were constructed for this study. The auditory discrimination test consisted of 22 minimal word pairs which differed by one distinctive feature; 8 minimal word pairs which had no differences were used as control items. Subjects listened to the pairs and answered "same" or "different." The oral production test consisted of 40 words which each subject heard twice and repeated once into a microphone. Both tests were recorded; the answers to the auditory discrimination test were recorded by the examiner, and the answers to the oral production test were recorded on tape and later evaluated by trained judges.A group of 50 children and a group of 50 adults participated in the study. Children were defined as first graders, and adults were defined as twelfth graders. Subjects were randomly chosen from the total first-grade population of 898 and the total twelfth grade population of 909 from the Muncie Community Schools in Muncie, Indiana. Fifteen elementary schools and three high schools were involved in the study. All subjects were native speakers of English and the language used for testing was Spanish. All subjects were tested individually.A two group multivariate analysis of variance was used to compare the vector of means of both tests for one group with the vector of means of both tests for the other group. Following a determination of significance, a univariate analysis of variance was used to determine the relative contribution of each measure to the overall results. A post hoc modified Hotelling's critical T2 was used to determine a more conservative value of T. The relationship between the two measures in this study was determined by a Pearson product-moment correlation.A moderate correlation between the two measures was found indicating some connection between auditory discrimination and oral production. These measures are conceptually related, but somewhat independent aspects of foreign language perception.While it was hypothesized that children would perform much better than adults, it was the adults who performed significantly better on both tests. The multivariate analysis of variance indicated that with both tests taken together, adults were superior in auditory discrimination and oral production. A univariate analysis indicated that adults also performed better on each test than the children. The null hypothesis, that there is no difference between groups, was rejected at the .0001 level.The findings of this study support the idea that adults, because of their cognitive advantage and maturity, are more efficient and successful in these two aspects of foreign language learning. Children did not exhibit the facility in foreign languages which early foreign language learning advocates have postulated.A number of studies which bypassed age as a critical factor in foreign language performance attributed differences between language learners to affective and environmental factors and to individual differences. In the experiment, the adults as a group performed significantly better than the children, but certain children as individuals were excellent in their performance just as certain adults as individuals were poor in their performance. However, the data from this study indicated that adults were generally superior to children on measures of auditory discrimination and oral production of foreign language sounds.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BSU/oai:cardinalscholar.bsu.edu:handle/180238 |
| Date | January 1981 |
| Creators | Rosenman, Alba Alicia Lipkin |
| Contributors | Bell, Harry H. |
| Source Sets | Ball State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | 79 leaves ; 28 cm. |
| Source | Virtual Press |
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