A language course helps adult students hear, but not say, vowel length differences

What is it about?

We measured how well adult beginner students of Finnish were able to hear and say differences in vowel length after taking part in an intensive four-week Finnish language course. We used Finnish non-words and sentences to measure their performance. We found that even though the students performed very well in our hearing test already before the course, they were able to improve their performance even further after it. When it came to saying the vowel length differences out loud, however, they did not show any improvement. We also found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that students who already had vowel length differences in their native languages consistently performed better than those who didn't, and were in fact very similar to native speakers of Finnish.

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Photo by Sam Balye on Unsplash

Photo by Sam Balye on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The results showed that the development of hearing and understanding a second language does not necessarily go hand in hand with being able to speak it, even if you practice both skills at the same time. Being able to affirm the advantage for already having the difference in your native language is also interesting, since there are conflicting results about how much it can help. Finally, based on some of our earlier studies, we were able to show that the learning patterns in classroom learning are similar to those achieved in laboratory training, i.e. hearing skills are easier to develop in the short-term than speaking.

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