No immersion, no instruction: children’s non-native vowel productions in a foreign language context

Abstract

This study aims to map the native Dutch and non-native English vowels of Belgian children who have not been immersed and have not received any school-based instruction in English, but who are exposed to it through the media. A fairly large and recent body of research addresses second language perception and production by early learners either through immersion in an L2-speaking community or through classroom-based instruction. However, there is also a vastly expanding number of children who live in a monolingual community and yet are exposed to English as a Foreign Language (EFL) from an early age through various media. This study addresses the question to what extent children acquire the English vowel system in such a context: is this type of exposure sufficient for them to create new phonetic vowel categories? Twenty-four Dutch-speaking children, aged between 9 and 12, participated in the study. They were all living in Belgium, and came from different dialect regions. None of them had received English instruction in school, but all of them reported having at least some sporadic contact with English, for instance, through television programmes or computer games. They all performed two Dutch picture-matching tasks, an English picture-naming task, and an English repetition task. The auditory stimuli were monosyllabic Dutch and English words containing each 12 Dutch and 11 English monophthongs. The vowel formants were analysed in Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2011) by comparing the LPC (Linear Predictive Coding) analysis to the FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) spectrum. Lobanov-normalized vowel plots present the organization of these children’s entire Dutch and English vowel spaces. The results focus on the English vowel contrasts /ε-æ/ and /ʊ-u/, as Dutch lacks these contrasts and has only one vowel in these areas of the vowel space (/ε / and /u/, respectively). The children produced a contrast between English /ε/ and /æ/ in the repetition task, but not in the picture-naming task. English /ε/, but not /æ/ was considerably different from the closest Dutch vowel /ε/. The children’s English /ʊ/ and /u/ differed in terms of height (F1) and anteriority (F2), both in the repetition and the picture-naming task. The closest Dutch vowel, represented as /u/, did not differ from English /u/, and differed from /ʊ/ only in terms of height. The results suggest that 9-12-year-old Flemish children are at the beginning of creating new contrasts for non-native English vowels. This means that media-induced Second Language Acquisition should not be underestimated: even in contexts of L2 acquisition exclusively through media exposure children learn to produce contrasts between L2 vowels which do not exist in their L1.