scholarly journals Relations between phonological production, grammar and the lexicon in bilingual French-English children

2021 ◽  
pp. 136700692110319
Author(s):  
Margaret Kehoe ◽  
Margaret Friend ◽  
Diane Poulin-Dubois

Aims and objectives: This study examines multiple associations between language domains in bilingual children with a focus on phonology. Previous studies indicate within- but not cross-language associations between vocabulary and grammar in bilingual children. We investigate whether the relation between phonology and other language domains differs from the one reported between vocabulary and grammar. Methodology: Canadian French-English bilingual children ( n = 31), aged 31 months, participated in 2 free-play sessions, from which lexical, grammatical and phonological information was extracted. The children’s parents completed the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories and its Canadian French adaptation providing additional information on vocabulary and grammar in each of the children’s languages. They also completed a questionnaire on their children’s exposure to French and English. Data analysis: Within and cross-language relations between phonology, vocabulary and grammar were investigated using correlational analyses and mixed logistic regression. Findings: Correlational analyses did not reveal significant cross-language relations between phonology, vocabulary and grammar. However, mixed logistic regression, which controlled for language exposure effects, indicated that phonology was influenced by vocabulary and grammar both within and across languages. Originality: This study is one of the first to study cross-domain relations involving phonology in young bilingual children. Implications: Overall, the findings suggest that phonology displays a pattern of relations that is different from other language domains engendering between-language effects due to a language-general component.

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marisa Tice ◽  
Melinda Woodley

A cohort of five beginning learners of French (L1 English) completed perception and production tasks in French and English on a weekly basis for four to six weeks. All participants were enrolled in a French language immersion program in Paris, France for the duration of the study. As controls, we also tested nine native English speakers who were not learning an L2. Participants regularly completed two perception studies over the six week period: phoneme discrimination and semantic priming, both in English. We find that over the testing period, French and English phoneme perception appeared to be tightly linked to L1 behavior. But, in the 3-5 week L2 exposure range, participants learning French begin to show evidence of category confusion for VOT in English (their L1) due to their L2 exposure to French. These early cross-language effects corroborate recent findings of phonetic shift in speech production of VOT, but demonstrate that the shift may also occur in perception. This suggests that second language exposure may have an effect on first language perception earlier than was previously thought.


Author(s):  
Margaret Kehoe ◽  
Diane Poulin-Dubois ◽  
Margaret Friend

Purpose This study investigated within-language and between-language associations between phonological memory, vocabulary, and grammar in French–English ( n = 43) and Spanish–English ( n = 25) bilingual children at 30, 36, and 48 months. It was predicted that phonological memory would display both within-language and between-language relations to language development and that these relations would be stronger at the youngest age. Method Bilingual children participated in free-play sessions in both of their languages at each age, from which vocabulary and grammatical information (number of different words and mean length of utterance) was extracted. Vocabulary information was also obtained from parent inventories completed when the children were 30 months and a standardized receptive vocabulary test administered at 36 and 48 months. The children were also administered nonword repetition tests in both of their languages at each age. Results Mixed logistic regression indicated that phonological memory was associated with vocabulary and grammar within the same language and phonological memory in the other language. In two of the four statistical models, phonological memory exhibited positive between-language relations, and in one model, it exhibited negative between-language relations to language development. Results also indicated that within-language and between-languages effects remained constant, or between-language associations decreased during the age range studied. Conclusion Overall, the findings provide some support for cross-language associations between phonological memory and lexical and grammatical skills.


2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Massol ◽  
Elena Berdasco ◽  
Nicola Molinaro ◽  
Jon Andoni Dunabeitia ◽  
Manuel Carreiras

Phonetica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jing Yang

Abstract This study examined the development of vowel categories in young Mandarin -English bilingual children. The participants included 35 children aged between 3 and 4 years old (15 Mandarin-English bilinguals, six English monolinguals, and 14 Mandarin monolinguals). The bilingual children were divided into two groups: one group had a shorter duration (<1 year) of intensive immersion in English (Bi-low group) and one group had a longer duration (>1 year) of intensive immersion in English (Bi-high group). The participants were recorded producing one list of Mandarin words containing the vowels /a, i, u, y, ɤ/ and/or one list of English words containing the vowels /i, ɪ, e, ɛ, æ, u, ʊ, o, ɑ, ʌ/. Formant frequency values were extracted at five equidistant time locations (the 20–35–50–65–80% point) over the course of vowel duration. Cross-language and within-language comparisons were conducted on the midpoint formant values and formant trajectories. The results showed that children in the Bi-low group produced their English vowels into clusters and showed positional deviations from the monolingual targets. However, they maintained the phonetic features of their native vowel sounds well and mainly used an assimilatory process to organize the vowel systems. Children in the Bi-high group separated their English vowels well. They used both assimilatory and dissimilatory processes to construct and refine the two vowel systems. These bilingual children approximated monolingual English children to a better extent than the children in the Bi-low group. However, when compared to the monolingual peers, they demonstrated observable deviations in both L1 and L2.


2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 521-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cassandra Foursha-Stevenson ◽  
Elena Nicoladis

Bilingual children sometimes perform better than same-aged monolingual children on metalinguistic awareness tasks, such as a grammaticality judgment. Some of these differences can be attributed to bilinguals having to learn to control attention to language choice. This study tested the hypothesis that bilingual children, as young as preschool age, would score overall higher than monolingual children on a grammaticality judgment test. French–English bilingual preschoolers judged the acceptability of three constructions in French and English (i.e. adjective–noun ordering, obligatoriness of a determiner, and object pronoun placement). Their performance was compared with that of a group of age-matched English monolinguals. The results showed that the bilingual children scored higher than the monolingual children. These results demonstrate that syntactic awareness develops quite early for bilinguals. Additionally, the bilingual children demonstrated cross-linguistic influence of core syntactic structure in French, as their judgments were affected by English acceptability.


2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (5) ◽  
pp. 500-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evelyn Eika ◽  
Yining Hsieh

Students in South East Asia often struggle with English /l/ and /r/. This study therefore set out to examine how Taiwanese pupils’ perception of these sounds is influenced by cross-language effects. Most Taiwanese students have Mandarin as L1 and Taiwanese as L2 or vice versa, and English as L3. A same–different discrimination experiment was conducted to measure pupils’ ability to discriminate between phonetically close English /r/ and /l/ and Mandarin /ʐ / and /l/. The results show that L1-Mandarin pupils discriminate both the English consonant contrast and the Mandarin consonant contrast better than L1-Taiwanese pupils. Discrimination difficulty may be higher if two members of a contrast are perceived as belonging to a single L1 category.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
L. Gómez-Pavón Durán

The aim of this study is to conduct an analysis of the investment made by the fifteen largest sovereign wealth funds on listed European companies. The analysis is divided into two sections: a descriptive one and a statistical one. The methodology used for this purpose consisted of mining data from Orbis database and running a binomial logistic regression. The main results show that, in the first place, the Norwegian fund is the one that invests in a larger amount of companies and European countries. Another significant result indicates that the United Kingdom is the country that receives the most investment. Finally, the results lead also to the conclusion that, concerning investing, sovereign wealth funds are influenced by a set of factors such as company size, profitability, and leverage, whereas the company’s home country and the economic sector it belongs are not determining factors.


2009 ◽  
Vol 104 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth G. Busch ◽  
William M. Grove ◽  
Jack Arbit ◽  
Robert John Zagar ◽  
John Russell Hughes ◽  
...  

To assess the risks predicting reoffense, 223 Rapists ( M age = 14.2 yr., SD = 1.5; 25 girls, 198 boys) were matched with 223 Nonviolent Delinquents; risks were analyzed using logistic regression. The one predictor was prior court contacts ( OR = 1.55e+12; AUC = .99, 95%CI = .98−.99). 223 Molesters were similarly matched with 223 Nonviolent Delinquents; this comparison yielded three predictors: previous court contacts ( OR = 4.55e+23), poorer executive function ( OR = 2.01), and lower social maturity ( OR = .97; AUC = .98, 95% CI = .97−.99). Records for all cases (now M age = 24.2 yr., SD = 1.4) were reviewed forward 10 years and youth were classified into groups: Sexual Homicidal (1%, n = 7), Delinquent Rapists Later Adult Rapists (11%, n = 73), Delinquent Rapists (21%, n = 144), Delinquent Molesters Later Adult Molesters (10%, n = 69), Delinquent Molesters (23%, n = 153), Nonviolent Delinquent Later Nonviolent Adult Criminals (7%, n = 45), and Nonviolent Delinquents (27%, n = 178). Comparison of Sexual Homicidal cases ( n = 7) with their matched Controls ( n = 7) yielded one predictor, poorer executive function ( AUC = .89, 95 % CI = .71−.93). When Sexual Homicidal cases were matched with Nonviolent Delinquents, predictors were low social maturity and prior court contacts ( AUC = .81, 95%CI= .64−.93).


Probus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juana M. Liceras ◽  
Raquel Fernández Fuertes

Abstract In bilingual child language acquisition research, a recurrent learnability issue has been to investigate whether and how cross-linguistic influence would interact with the non-adult patterns of omission/production of functional categories. In this paper, we analyze the omission/production of subject pronouns in the earliest stage English grammar and the earliest stage Spanish grammar of two English–Spanish simultaneous bilingual children (FerFuLice corpus in CHILDES). We base this analysis on Holmberg’s (2005, Is there a little pro? Evidence from Finnish. Linguistic Inquiry 36. 533–564) and Sheehan’s (2006, The EPP and null subjects in Romance. Newcastle: Newcastle University PhD dissertation) formulation of the null subject parameter and on Liceras et al.’s (2012, Overt subjects and copula omission in the Spanish and the English grammar of English-Spanish bilinguals: On the locus and directionality of interlinguistic influence. First Language 32(1–2). 88–115) assumptions concerning the role of lexical specialization in cross-linguistic influence. We have conducted a comparative analysis of the patterns of production/omission of English and Spanish overt and null subjects in two bilingual children, on the one hand, versus the patterns of production/omission of one monolingual English child and one monolingual Spanish child, on the other. The results show that while there is no conclusive evidence as to whether or not English influences the higher production of overt subjects in child bilingual Spanish, the presence of null subjects in Spanish has a positive influence in the eradication of non-adult null subjects in bilingual English. We argue that in a bilingual situation, as compared to a monolingual one, lexical specialization in one of the languages of the bilinguals (the availability of an overt and a null realization of the subject in Spanish) facilitates the acquisition of the other language.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document