Ardisik iki dilli yetiskinlerde unlu fonemlerin algilanmasi

We investigated the effect of early exposure to a second language on the perception of isolated vowel contrasts with three groups: Turkish-English early bilinguals, Turkish-English late bilinguals, monolingual. As stimuli, we used isolated forms of vowels from English, Turkish and Thai. Results revealed that for Thai-only native contrasts, a significant difference was observed between late and early bilinguals for both phonetic and phonological levels of processing suggesting that acquisition of a second language prior to reading skills acquisition paves the way for sensitivity to non-native vowel contrasts. Findings are discussed in the light of theoretical considerations as well as in terms of applied settings such as second language learning and teaching.