About Hearing and Learning a Second Language

It is known that the first language of a person influences the way a second language is heard and how this person experiences speech sounds.
When learning a language the specific sounds (phonemes) from the first language are ‘programmed’ in the hearing system of a baby. Sounds that are not used (also: frequencies, prosodic elements) will be inactive until re-activated or even completely disappear (Groenen & Crul, 1998).
This is also known as the ‘Aangeboren Taal-Magneettheorie van Kuhl’. This theory states (in short) that new-borns are capable of discriminating contrasts of all possible phonemes, but when a child reaches the age of one year the possibility of discriminating phonemic contrasts from different languages than used in his first language will decrease.
This relates directly to the speech production. From the moment that a child is one year old the utterances will become specific for the first language only (Simkens, 1998).
After the age of twelve it has become very difficult to create changes in the active hearing of phonemes. The second language learner has to train the possibility of hearing and recognizing the ‘new’ sounds.
About the influence of hearing-skills and the relation with pronunciation it is known that the direct connection is very important for language development. (Koopmans- van Beinum, Clement & van der Stelt, 1998).
As said by Groenen and Crul (1998): when we think about causality: speechperception and speechproduction are influencing each other in one direct process and this underlines the important role of auditory skills in a language learning process.
In adults we see ‘perceptual assimilation’. This is the process of hearing a similar phoneme that exists in the first language of an adult listener, not being the right phoneme in the new language. The heard phoneme relates with the sound that is meant, but is not the exact phoneme.
The right phoneme will therefore not be produced as well. It is very difficult for adults to hear differences in relating phonemes (Groenen & Crul, 1998).

Re-activating can be done when an adult learns a second language that has different phonemes, prosody or frequencies used. The theory is now that a speech training, where pronunciation is learned in a way that is specifically aiming at already known problems that are to be expected for a native speaker of a certain language (being for example the not known sounds, frequencies, prosodic elements), can be of great help in learning a better pronunciation.
Feedback in speech-lessons given by a native speaker is therefore an important help in learning to hear the sounds to learn (Groenen & Crul, 1998).

Written by M. Coppens