Chen, J. , Liu, Y. , Li, A. & Wang, T.
National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan
Discrimination learning is one of several implicit learning mechanisms not only available for learning one?s first language, but, we hypothesize, also available for learning a second language. The hypothesis was tested by engaging 20 Chinese speakers in a perceptual discrimination task involving Korean minimal word pairs. Three categories of stop consonants were selected, each with a minimal contrast distinguishing a lenis and a fortis member. Six minimal word pairs so contrasted were chosen for each category. Half of the pairs in each category were randomly selected for each participant to serve as the trained pairs, and the remaining half as the untrained ones. Each pair was permuted to produce all four possible arrangements. All 72 pairs, spoken by a female native Korean speaker, were presented to the participants in a pre-test to determine if the members of each pair were the same or different words. Following the pre-test, the trained pairs were administered to the participants in the same way as in the pre-test. Feedback was given after each trial. A pair was repeatedly administered until the participants scored correctly on that pair three times in a row. Across participants and pairs, each pair took an average of 5.3 repetitions before it was learned to criterion. A post-test involving the same 72 pairs followed the training. For the trained pairs, the proportion of correct responses was .68 on the pre-test and .79 on the post-test. For the untrained pairs, these proportions were .66 and .74, respectively. These results show that training improved performance by about 16%. In addition, the outcome of discrimination learning achieved during training could transfer to benefit the performance on the untrained pairs to almost the same extent (12%). We conclude that discrimination learning of linguistic forms can be a powerful mechanism for learning a second language.