Foreign-language speech segmentation in ab initio child learners

Von Holzen, K., Wulfert, S., Schnieders, M., & Hopp, H. (2024). Foreign-language speech segmentation in ab initio child learners. Poster presented at the 2024 Congress of the International Association for the Study of Child Language, Prague, Czech Republic.When adults segment words in a new language, they continue to apply sublexical, phonotactic cues from the L1 (Finn & Hudson Kam, 2008) and benefit from lexical overlap in form and meaning with L1 equivalents (i.e. cognates: English: /kraʊn/; German: /kroːnə/; noncognate: English: /skɪn/; German: /haʊ̯t/; Shoemaker & Rast, 2013). In school-aged children, foreign-language segmentation is under-studied. In two studies, we examine the role of developing L1 sublexical and lexical knowledge on German primary-school students’ segmentation of English speech before they receive instruction in English.113 German 6- to 10-year-olds listened to English sentences followed by an isolated probe-word that either did (target) or did not (lure) appear in the sentence. Children indicated via button press whether they had heard the probe word in the sentence (word acceptance). In Study 1, target pseudowords appeared in a context which provided a clear L1-German phonotactic cue to a word boundary (e.g., lv; dal_vouchen) or an L1-ambiguous cue (kv; dack_vouchen). In Study 2, target words were English-German cognate and noncognate words (She reduced her crown/skin mursk to poverty). We also assessed phonological awareness in a phoneme-manipulation task (Bialystok et al., 2003).Higher acceptance rates for targets than lures show that children were able to segment and subsequently recognize all target words, a difference that improved with increasing phonological awareness skills. Unlike adult FL learners, there was no evidence at the group level that primary-school students use L1 phonotactic cues (Study 1) or benefit from form-based lexical overlap with their L1 (Study 2) when they begin learning a new language. However, exploratory analyses revealed that the children with the lowest receptive English skills (gained through passive exposure outside of school) did rely on L1 phonotactic cues, suggesting a role for L1 phonotactic cues in speech segmentation at an early stage of L2 acquisition.