Students' discrimination of german contrasts after 1 year of dual immersion

Research has demonstrated that an early age of onset may be advantageous for second language acquisition. Generally, such studies use subjects who have learned the target language through naturalistic immersion. However, few studies explore the phonological acquisition of students in immersion education programs. This study investigates whether first graders with 1 year of German dual language immersion (DLI) (experiment subjects) are able to perform significantly better than their nonimmersion peers (control subjects) on an oddity vowel discrimination task contrasting the vowels /ʊ/ and the German /ʏ/. The experiment and control groups were tested using an “odd man out” paradigm with four options: vowel A, B, or C as the odd vowel in a change trial, or X indicating that all vowels in the trial were the same. The DLI group did not perform better than the nonimmersion group; however, the nonimmersion group was more likely to select “same” while the DLI group more often selected A, B, or C. These results may indicate that DLI students with 1 year of immersion experience have begun forming a new phonological category for the German vowel /ʏ/ but are not yet able to correctly distinguish it from their more established /ʊ/ category.