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General auditory processing, Mandarin L1 prosodic and phonological awareness, and English L2 word learning

  • Wei-Lun Chung ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: January 4, 2024
International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching
From the journal International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching Volume 63 Issue 3

Abstract

This study examined general auditory processing, Mandarin L1 prosodic and phonological awareness, and the relations with English L2 word learning. Participants were 61 Mandarin-speaking children who learned English as an L2 in Taiwan. They received the following tasks: general auditory processing (i.e., amplitude envelope rise time, pitch contour and interval), Mandarin L1 prosodic and phonological awareness, and English L2 word learning (at Time 1 and 2). The results revealed that (1) only amplitude envelope rise time discrimination, independent of years of English learning, predicted English L2 word learning at Time 1, (2) Mandarin L1 phonological awareness, relative to Mandarin L1 prosodic awareness, made more contributions to English L2 word learning after controlling amplitude envelope rise time discrimination, and (3) successful English learners outperformed their unsuccessful peers on Mandarin L1 phonological awareness. Taken together, beginning English learners might use amplitude envelop rise time cuing syllable boundaries and rely on L1 prosodic and phonological awareness for English L2 word learning.

Keywords: auditory perception; phonological awareness; prosodic awareness; word learning
Corresponding author: Wei-Lun Chung, Department of Special Education, National Taipei University of Education, No. 134, Sec. 2, Heping E. Rd., Da-an District, Taipei 10671, Taiwan, E-mail:

Funding source: Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan

Award Identifier / Grant number: MOST 107-2410-H-152-027, MOST 108-2410-H-152-009, MOST 109-2410-H-152-028, MOST 110-2410-H-152-004

  1. Research funding: This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology under Grants: MOST 107-2410-H-152-027, MOST 108-2410-H-152-009, MOST 109-2410-H-152-028 and MOST 110-2410-H-152-004.

  2. Data availability statement: The author has not been granted by children’s parents in written consent to share data with other researchers. Thus, the data that support the findings of this study are not available in a public repository and on request. Future studies would secure data sharing in written consent.

  3. Competing interests: The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

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Received: 2023-07-20
Accepted: 2023-12-11
Published Online: 2024-01-04
Published in Print: 2025-09-25

© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Young L2 learners in diverse instructional contexts
  4. Research Articles
  5. Impact of post-task explicit instruction on the interaction among child EFL learners in online task-based reading lessons
  6. Can we train young EFL learners to ‘notice the gap’? Exploring the relationship between metalinguistic awareness, grammar learning and the use of metalinguistic explanations in a dictogloss task
  7. Exploring self-regulated learning behaviours of young second language learners during group work
  8. Developmental trajectories of discourse features by age and learning environment
  9. Implementing an oral task in an EFL classroom with low proficient learners: a micro-evaluation
  10. Exploring teacher-student interaction in task and non-task sequences
  11. Children learning Mongolian as an additional language through the implementation of a task-based approach
  12. “Black children are gifted at learning languages – that’s why I could do TBLT”: inclusive Blackness as a pathway for TBLT innovation
  13. Regular Articles
  14. Defining competencies for training non-native Korean speaking teachers: a Q methodology approach
  15. A cross-modal analysis of lexical sophistication: EFL and ESL learners in written and spoken production
  16. Using sentence processing speed and automaticity to predict L2 performance in the productive and receptive tasks
  17. Distance-invoked difficulty as a trigger for errors in Chinese and Japanese EFL learners’ English writings
  18. Exploring Chinese university English writing teachers’ emotions in providing feedback on student writing
  19. General auditory processing, Mandarin L1 prosodic and phonological awareness, and English L2 word learning
  20. Why is L2 pragmatics still a neglected area in EFL teaching? Uncovered stories from Vietnamese EFL teachers
  21. Validation of metacognitive knowledge in vocabulary learning and its predictive effects on incidental vocabulary learning from reading
  22. Anxiety and enjoyment in oral presentations: a mixed-method study into Chinese EFL learners’ oral presentation performance
  23. The influence of language contact and ethnic identification on Chinese as a second language learners’ oral proficiency
  24. An idiodynamic study of the interconnectedness between cognitive and affective components underlying L2 willingness to communicate
  25. “I usually just rely on my intuition and go from there.” pedagogical rules and metalinguistic awareness of pre-service EFL teachers
  26. Development and validation of Questionnaire for Self-regulated Learning Writing Strategies (QSRLWS) for EFL learners
  27. Language transfer in tense acquisition: new evidence from English learning Chinese adolescents
  28. A systematic review of English-as-a-foreign-language vocabulary learning activities for primary school students
  29. Using automated indices of cohesion to explore the growth of cohesive features in L2 writing
  30. The impact of text-audio synchronized enhancement on collocation learning from reading-while-listening: an extended replication of Jung and Lee (2023)
https://doi.org/10.1515/iral-2023-0168
Keywords for this article
auditory perception; phonological awareness; prosodic awareness; word learning

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Young L2 learners in diverse instructional contexts
  4. Research Articles
  5. Impact of post-task explicit instruction on the interaction among child EFL learners in online task-based reading lessons
  6. Can we train young EFL learners to ‘notice the gap’? Exploring the relationship between metalinguistic awareness, grammar learning and the use of metalinguistic explanations in a dictogloss task
  7. Exploring self-regulated learning behaviours of young second language learners during group work
  8. Developmental trajectories of discourse features by age and learning environment
  9. Implementing an oral task in an EFL classroom with low proficient learners: a micro-evaluation
  10. Exploring teacher-student interaction in task and non-task sequences
  11. Children learning Mongolian as an additional language through the implementation of a task-based approach
  12. “Black children are gifted at learning languages – that’s why I could do TBLT”: inclusive Blackness as a pathway for TBLT innovation
  13. Regular Articles
  14. Defining competencies for training non-native Korean speaking teachers: a Q methodology approach
  15. A cross-modal analysis of lexical sophistication: EFL and ESL learners in written and spoken production
  16. Using sentence processing speed and automaticity to predict L2 performance in the productive and receptive tasks
  17. Distance-invoked difficulty as a trigger for errors in Chinese and Japanese EFL learners’ English writings
  18. Exploring Chinese university English writing teachers’ emotions in providing feedback on student writing
  19. General auditory processing, Mandarin L1 prosodic and phonological awareness, and English L2 word learning
  20. Why is L2 pragmatics still a neglected area in EFL teaching? Uncovered stories from Vietnamese EFL teachers
  21. Validation of metacognitive knowledge in vocabulary learning and its predictive effects on incidental vocabulary learning from reading
  22. Anxiety and enjoyment in oral presentations: a mixed-method study into Chinese EFL learners’ oral presentation performance
  23. The influence of language contact and ethnic identification on Chinese as a second language learners’ oral proficiency
  24. An idiodynamic study of the interconnectedness between cognitive and affective components underlying L2 willingness to communicate
  25. “I usually just rely on my intuition and go from there.” pedagogical rules and metalinguistic awareness of pre-service EFL teachers
  26. Development and validation of Questionnaire for Self-regulated Learning Writing Strategies (QSRLWS) for EFL learners
  27. Language transfer in tense acquisition: new evidence from English learning Chinese adolescents
  28. A systematic review of English-as-a-foreign-language vocabulary learning activities for primary school students
  29. Using automated indices of cohesion to explore the growth of cohesive features in L2 writing
  30. The impact of text-audio synchronized enhancement on collocation learning from reading-while-listening: an extended replication of Jung and Lee (2023)
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