Connecting perception and production in early Catalan-Spanish bilingual children: language dominance and quality of input effects.

This study investigates perception and production of the Catalan mid-vowel /e/-/ɛ/ contrast by two groups of 4.5-year-old Catalan-Spanish bilingual children, differing in language dominance. Perception was assessed with an XAB discrimination task involving familiar words and non-words. Production accuracy was measured using a familiar-word elicitation task. Overall, Catalan-dominant bilingual children outperformed Spanish-dominant bilinguals, the latter showing high variability in production accuracy, while being slightly above chance level in perception. No correlation between perception and production performance could be established in this group. The effect of language dominance alone could not explain the Spanish-dominant participants' performance, but quality of Catalan input (native vs. accented speech) was identified as an important factor behind familiar-word production and the inaccurate representation of the target contrast in the lexicon of the bilinguals' less-dominant language. More fine-grained measurements of experience-related factors are needed for a full understanding of the acquisition of challenging contrasts in bilingual contexts.

Rethinking assessment measures of phonological development and their application in bilingual acquisition.

This article discusses the measurements for phonological and prosodic development put forward in Ingram [Ingram, D. (2002). The measurement of whole-word productions. Journal of Child Language, 29, 713-733.], while at the same time expanding the crucial measures, phonological mean length of utterance (PMLU) and proportion of whole-word proximity (PWP). The goal of the expansion is to accommodate a wider set of phenomena, specifically those related to bilingual acquisition of languages with different categories (e.g. closed syllables in German and open syllables in Spanish). Data from three monolingual Spanish children and from three bilingual German--Spanish children are presented as illustration of the modified measurements: expanded PMLU of features (ePMLU-F), expanded PMLU of syllables (ePMLU-S) and expanded PWP (ePWP). By means of measuring both features and prosodic positions, the expanded measurements do better justice to the various aspects of child phonology. Nonetheless, an important goal of this article is to stimulate discussion in order to bring our state-of-the-art closer to descriptive adequacy.

A Spanish pilot investigation for a crosslinguistic study in protracted phonological development.

A crosslinguistic study is underway concerning children's protracted phonological development (i.e. speech sound disorders). The current article reports pilot Spanish data for this study from two 4-year-old boys with protracted phonological development. The purposes of the pilot study were to: (1) develop and evaluate a word list for elicitation that could be used across Spanish dialects and that sufficiently sampled Spanish word lengths, stress patterns, word shapes and phonemes; and (2) to derive hypotheses for the larger study, based on patterns found in these children's speech, and a review of the literature. The two speakers showed some developmental patterns reported for other languages (e.g. constraints on production of liquids and word-initial consonants in unstressed syllables) but also patterns that may reflect Spanish phonological inventories, allophony and frequencies. These data helped consolidate the Spanish word list for elicitation and led to questions for the ongoing study concerning word structure, multisyllabic words, liquids, fricatives and vowel sequences.

The acquisition of prosodic word structures in Spanish by monolingual and Spanish-German bilingual children.

This article examines the constraints on Prosodic Word production in Spanish by three monolingual and three Spanish-German bilingual children from the beginning of word production until 2;2. It also considers the relationship between Prosodic Words and Phonological Phrases, and in the case of monosyllabic words, it takes into consideration syllable structure (i.e., presence or absence of codas), in order to ascertain the importance of foot binarity in early child speech. Although the preferred Prosodic Word shape is that of a trochee, there appear a few monosyllables, consisting of CVC (or CV), which are produced earlier by the bilinguals than by the monolinguals. The minimality constraint is violated by the production of CV forms. Maximality constraints are observed for a very short time, as unfooted syllables appear very soon, especially in the data of the monolinguals. However, it takes several more months until Spanish children are able to produce Prosodic Words containing two feet, whereas Phonological Phrases constituted by two disyllabic Prosodic Words are produced earlier by some children. It is proposed that such data can be optimally treated by means of constraints, and their relevance to the question of whether prosodic structure is acquired bottom-up is briefly discussed.

The acquisition of nuclei: a longitudinal analysis of phonological vowel length in three German-speaking children.

Studies of vowel length acquisition indicate an initial stage in which phonological vowel length is random followed by a stage in which either long vowels (without codas) or short vowels and codas are produced. To determine whether this sequence of acquisition applies to a group of German-speaking children (three children aged 1;3-2;6), monosyllabic and disyllabic words were transcribed and acoustically analysed. The results did not support a stage in which vowel length was totally random. At the first time period (onset of word production to 1;7), one child's monosyllabic productions were governed by a bipositional constraint such that either long vowels, or short vowels and codas were produced. At the second (1;10 to 2;0) and third time periods (2;3 to 2;6), all three children produced target long vowels significantly longer than target short vowels. Transcription results indicated that children experienced more difficulty producing target long than short vowels. In the discussion, the findings are interpreted in terms of the representation of vowel length in children's grammars.

Intervocalic consonants in the acquisition of German: onsets, codas or something else?

This study examines the behaviour of five phonemes /f, [symbol: see text], ts, k, l/ in word-initial, word-final, and intervocalic positions in the productions of five German-speaking children (age 1;3 to 3;3 years) in order to determine the patterning of those intervocalic consonants--do they behave more like onsets or codas? The study also contrasts the behaviour of intervocalic consonants after short versus long vowels in view of the stance taken in the theoretical literature that intervocalic consonants after short vowels are ambisyllabic but not after long vowels. Findings show that out of 25 conditions (5 phonemes x 5 children), nine yield support for the patterning of intervocalic consonants as codas, two as onsets, and five as unique (neither coda nor onset). Three conditions yield support for the dual patterning of intervocalic consonants. In all other conditions, there was insufficient information to support their patterning with codas or with onsets. Results provide minimal support for different patterns of intervocalic consonants after short and long vowels; however, the lengthening and insertion of consonants after short vowels suggest that children are aware of the different phonological roles of intervocalic consonants after short and long vowels.