• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.9 no.2
• /
• pp.35-70
• /
• 2003

This study investigates the acquisition of English prepositions of location and direction by Malaysian Chinese ESL learners. It was conducted with the objective of finding out which of the two types of prepositions was more problematic to the L1 Chinese learners. The study also sought to investigate the effect of age and proficiency levels in English on the acquisition of the English prepositions of location and direction by these learners. Additionally, the study sets out to determine the extent to which the L1 Chinese learners have acquired the English prepositions of location and direction. This study involved three groups of Chinese ESL learners: elementary, intermediate and advanced. They were selected based on their age and their performance on a standardized proficiency test. The instrument used to collect data was a preposition test comprising 85 items. These items on prepositions of location and direction were randomly arranged in the tasks. The test required subjects to respond to multiple choice questions, match given sentences with appropriate prepositions, fill in blanks with the appropriate prepositions, judge given sentences to see if they are grammatical or ungrammatical and correct the ungrammatical sentence by providing the appropriate prepositions. The results indicate that age and proficiency levels of the learners made a difference in the acquisition of English prepositions of location and direction. The older learners with higher proficiency levels seem to fare better than the younger and less proficient learners. The results suggest that the prepositions of location arc slightly more problematic than prepositions of directions to the L1 Chinese learners. Our data also suggest that certain prepositions of each type are more problematic than others.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.15 no.8
• /
• pp.424-433
• /
• 2015

This study tried to investigate the differences between auditory preferences for a discrimination study of minimal pairs with the different onset and the same nucleus of a syllable on the basis of articulator-distance in case of Korean infants and toddlers. As a result we found a main effect for articulator-distance and age but not an effect according to the types of phonation especially in terms of tense. Former results are line with the previous studies having reported the order of consonants acquisition based on the places of articulation suggesting that more sensitive responses for the contiguous and different phonemes may lead earlier acquisition for the same place of articulation of the speech sounds. Specifically, bilabial soudns are followed by alveolar and palatal sounds in order. The latter results also showed that tense consonants got a high rate of recognition beside lax consonants according to the age and sex.