Stop production in Spanish-English bilingual children
Date
2022-08
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Abstract
Stop sounds (i.e., [p, t, k, b, d, g]) are relatively early sounds in children’s acquisition and have specific features that can be measured and compared crosslinguistically. Spanish voiceless stops have shorter voice onset time values than English voiceless stops, and Spanish voiced stops vary allophonically to approximants, a process that does not occur in English. Because previous child bilingual language acquisition studies on these sounds have provided dissonant findings (e.g., Macken & Barton, 1978, 1980; Fabiano-Smith et al., 2015), this thesis investigates the phonetic productions of one child who has been exposed to Spanish and English from birth and examines the role of family language practices. The case study data were collected from one Spanish-English bilingual family (child aged 5;3; mother; father). Participants completed a picture naming task and narrative task in both languages. The mother also completed a language survey to gauge the language use and attitudes in the home. The quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed for correlations between the production task results and language input and attitudes. The findings reveal that the child’s Spanish voiceless and voiced productions were within her parents’ production ranges and within monolingual norms, and that her English voiceless stop production differs from her parents’ and falls within the English monolingual range as set out in previous literature, while the child’s English voiced stop acquisition may still be underway. These results provide evidence that her two languages are differentiated. This research adds to the literature on bilingual child language development and aims to improve our understanding of bilingual development to inform families and decision makers.
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Keywords
child language acquisition, phonetics, phonology, acoustic analysis, bilingual, English, Spanish, language input, language attitudes, sociolinguistics
Citation
Schnider, R. (2022). Stop production in Spanish-English bilingual children (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.