Learning nonnative names: The effect of poor native phonological awareness

Abstract

This research investigates the influence of phonological awareness on the learning of vocabulary in a foreign language. Thirty-seven Chinese-speaking third graders with high phonological awareness and 37 with low phonological awareness participated in multitrial word learning tasks involving nonnative sounding (English) new names paired with novel referents. The children also participated in three additional associative learning tasks: learning to associate novel native sounding names, familiar native names, and unfamiliar visual shapes with unfamiliar referents. Results indicated that children with lower phonological awareness learned both the novel nonnative names and the novel native names less accurately than children with higher phonological awareness and required more learning trials. However, these two groups did not differ in learning to associate familiar names or unfamiliar visual shapes with novel referents. The findings suggest that poor phonological awareness might slow nonnative acquisition of vocabulary via difficulty in constructing new phonological representations for new words.To adults who are proficient readers and writers, it seems quite obvious that spoken words are composed of strings of discrete phonological segments. However, for children the insight that words are composed of discrete segments comes gradually, often as a result of literacy instruction. To many young children, and even to some adolescents and adults, a word is a word, distinguishable from other words holistically in terms of pitch contours, rhythm, stress, increased duration, and strong-weak template; however, the segmental details of the word are obscured by the overall phonological shape of the word. Knowledge of the discrete sound segments of language, that is, phonological awareness, has been found to relate to poor performance on a number of language processing tasks, such as naming objects and pictures (

Use orthography in L2 auditory word learning: Who benefits?

“…The Low-PA group did not represent a group of children who were slow in general verbal ability, as the two groups of children did not differ on the PPVT-R, a test of receptive vocabulary (t(72) = 1.9, p [ .05), and digit span (t(72) = 1.6, p [ .05). The details of the subject selection tests were given in another paper (Hu & Schuele, 2005), which reported the findings on the role of phonological awareness in novel word learning for the same group of children.…”

“…These children may be able to form partial pronunciation by relying upon one or two salient letters but the resulting pronunciation is usually not sufficiently detailed for rapid and fluent word recognition. In addition to problems in literacy acquisition, children with poor PA have been found to be slow in learning words through the auditory mode (Bowey, 1996;Elbro & Jesen, 2005;de Jong, Seveke, & van Veen, 2000;Hu, 2003;Hu & Schuele, 2005;Mayringer & Wimmer, 2000). Such being the case, one may conclude that children with poor PA will not be able to capitalize on orthographic information in assisting auditory word learning.…”

“…In producing a novel sound sequence, a less segmented representation may render it difficult to assign the novel stimulus into a recoverable representation (Edwards, Beckman, & Munson, 2004;Fisher, Hunt, Chambers, & Church, 2001). Given that children with poor PA tend to attend to acoustic cues primarily associated with more global characteristics of speech (Mayo, Scobbie, Hewlett, & Waters, 2003;Nittrouer, 1996), it is not surprising that these children are slow in establishing segmented representations for novel words they just encounter (Bowey, 1996;Elbro & Jesen, 2005;de Jong, Seveke, & van Veen, 2000;Hu, 2003;Hu & Schuele, 2005;Mayringer & Wimmer, 2000). For example, in a study of paired-associate word learning ability, Hu and Schuele (2005) found that children with poorer PA were slower in learning auditory names that involved the construction of new phonological forms such as new L2 or L1 names than children with better PA.…”

“…Given that children with poor PA tend to attend to acoustic cues primarily associated with more global characteristics of speech (Mayo, Scobbie, Hewlett, & Waters, 2003;Nittrouer, 1996), it is not surprising that these children are slow in establishing segmented representations for novel words they just encounter (Bowey, 1996;Elbro & Jesen, 2005;de Jong, Seveke, & van Veen, 2000;Hu, 2003;Hu & Schuele, 2005;Mayringer & Wimmer, 2000). For example, in a study of paired-associate word learning ability, Hu and Schuele (2005) found that children with poorer PA were slower in learning auditory names that involved the construction of new phonological forms such as new L2 or L1 names than children with better PA. They, however, were comparable to children with better PA in paired-associate word learning that did not involve the construction of new phonological forms such as familiar auditory names or visual abstract forms.…”

“…These children have been studied and followed for 4 years, from third grade to sixth grade. Part of the data were reported in Hu and Schuele (2005), who found that children with poor PA had specific difficulty in learning novel words presented in an auditory mode. In the present study, the children took a word learning task, in which English words were presented with or without orthographic information.…”