Learning preaspirated consonants and artificial language

Katsumi NAGAI (Kagawa University)

Abstract: 21 Japanese learners of English were divided into two groups to investigate the effect of phoneme awareness when learning an artificial language. In the first session, the test group had a discrimination task of pre-aspirated consonants (a new phoneme for both Japanese and English speakers). The control group listened to the same number of test words, but no specific tasks were required. In the second session, both groups listened to sentences which included pre-aspirated words in the artificial language. Then participants were asked to decide whether the sentences were grammatically correct or not. The results showed that the control group significantly outperformed the test group in the second sessions, and this finding suggests that phonemic awareness may not constitute a crucial part of language learning.