Phonology, Working Memory, and Foreign-language Learning

Three tasks were used to predict English learning by Finnish children over a three-year period. In the pseudoword repetition task the pupils had to repeat aloud tape-recorded pseudowords sounding like Finnish or English. In the pseudoword copying task the pupils saw strings of letters resembling Finnish or English words and copied them when they had disappeared from view. When comparing syntactic-semantic structures, the pupils had to find the …