Purpose Children and early adolescents seem to have an advantage over adults in acquiring nonnative speech sounds, supported by evidence showing that earlier age of acquisition strongly predicts second language attainment. Although many factors influence children’s ultimate success in language learning, it is unknown whether children rely on different, perhaps more efficient learning mechanisms than adults. Method The current study compared children (aged 10–16 years) and adults in their learning of a nonnative Hindi contrast. We tested the hypothesis that younger participants would show superior baseline discriminability or learning of the contrast, better memory for new sounds after a delay, or improved generalization to a new talker's voice. Measures of phonological and auditory skills were collected to determine whether individual variability in these skills predicts nonnative speech sound learning and whether these potential relationships differ between adults and children. Results Adults showed superior pretraining sensitivity to the contrast compared to children, and these pretraining discrimination scores predicted learning and retention. Even though adults seemed to have an initial advantage in learning, children improved after a period of off-line consolidation on the trained identification task and began to catch up to adults after an overnight delay. Additionally, perceptual skills that predicted speech sound learning differed between adults and children, suggesting they rely on different learning mechanisms. Conclusions These findings challenge the view that children are simply better speech sound learners than adults and suggest that their advantages may be due to different learning mechanisms or better retention of nonnative contrasts over the broader language learning trajectory. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12735914

中文翻译：

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成人在学习困难的非母语语音方面比儿童表现出初步优势

目的儿童和青少年早期在习得非母语语音方面似乎比成年人更有优势，有证据表明，较早的习得年龄强烈预示着第二语言的掌握。尽管许多因素影响儿童在语言学习中的最终成功，但尚不清楚儿童是否依赖于不同的、可能比成人更有效的学习机制。 方法当前的研究比较了儿童（10-16 岁）和成人学习非母语印地语的情况。我们测试了这样的假设：年轻的参与者会表现出优异的基线辨别能力或对比学习能力，延迟后对新声音有更好的记忆，或者对新说话者声音的概括能力有所提高。收集语音和听觉技能的测量结果，以确定这些技能的个体差异是否可以预测非母语语音学习，以及成人和儿童之间的这些潜在关系是否有所不同。 结果与儿童相比，成人对对比表现出更高的训练前敏感性，这些训练前辨别力分数可以预测学习和记忆力。尽管成人在学习上最初似乎具有优势，但孩子们经过一段时间的线下巩固训练好的识别任务后有所进步，并在一夜之间的延迟后开始赶上成人。此外，预测语音学习的感知技能在成人和儿童之间有所不同，这表明他们依赖于不同的学习机制。 结论这些发现挑战了儿童比成人更好的语音学习者的观点，并表明他们的优势可能是由于不同的学习机制或在更广泛的语言学习轨迹上更好地保留非母语对比。 补充材料 https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12735914