Fricative perception in six and eight year old Thai children

Abstract

The present study examines the perception of English sounds by Thai children. It aims to investigate the effect of English learning, age, and speech processing on speech perception. The speech perception test is designed to test two groups of Thai children with 2 different language backgrounds. The 24 subjects in the Thai group are exposed to only Thai language and the 24 subjects in the Thai and English group are exposed to both Thai and English languages. For each group half of the children are 6 years old and the other half are 8 years old. There is an equal number of males and females in each sub-group. Subjects are tested by listening to 6 sound pairs namely (f-s) (θ-ʃ) (f-θ) (f-ʃ) (s-θ) และ (s-ʃ). The subjects are tested on 2 interstimulus interval levels, 500 ms and 1500 ms, i.e. the second sound in presented to the subjects after the first sound for 500 or 1500 ms respectively. Subjects‘ discrimination scores are analysed with Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The present experiment used the significant F value at .05 level of significance and the F₍₁‚̦₄₄₎ is 4.06. The subjects‘ discrimination ability of sound pairs indicates that the acoustic properties of the fricative sounds play an important role in the perception of sounds. The contribution of English learning on the perception of English sounds is found after 6 years critical age. There is a phonological bias to the processing of sounds in foreign language in the 6 year olds. The 6 years old group has better phonetic processing than phonemic processing of English fricative sounds.