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Previous research in child language shows that many aspects of language acquisition are frequency-linked. This study tests whether input or usage frequency predicts the order of acquisition and accuracy of a bilingual Greek–English child's English possessives. The child was followed longitudinally from age 2;6 to 3;11. Order of acquisition was comparable to that of same-aged monolingual children. The child's usage frequency and order of acquisition were highly correlated with input frequency, while her accuracy was not. We argue that the child's already-acquired Greek possessives facilitated acquisition of English possessives, even though the child's English input and usage frequencies were lower than in monolingual English children.

Studying infrequent variants in child developmental speech is insightful for language representation and processing. Phonological processes like anticipation and perseveration account for such productions in children. How children process such infrequent variants during development has not been fully explored. In particular, there is no study on the separation of within-word vowel sequences by consonant addition in monolingual or bilingual children. The present study investigates this in a bilingual child’s phonological development in English and Greek, from age 2;7 to 3;9. Sufficient data were obtained for English diphthongs and hiatus and Greek hiatus. Results show that Greek, the stronger language by 1 MLU, interferes with perseverations in English between code-switched utterances. Such consonant additions, which are more frequent in the stronger language, decrease with age in both languages. While anticipation overall increases with age in both languages, within-word perseveration also increases. Word-position frequency of vowel sequences and of their added consonants in the words triggering them, as well as processing distance, are language and process (anticipation/perseveration) dependent. The results offer insights into error processing in child monolingual and bilingual speech.

AbstractTypical morpho-phonological measures of children’s speech realizations used in the literature depend linearly on their components. Examples are the proportion of consonants correct, the mean length of utterance and the phonological mean length of utterance. Because of their linear dependence on their components, these measures change in proportion to their component changes between speech realizations. However, there are instances in which variable speech realizations need to be differentiated better. Therefore, a measure which is more sensitive to its components than linear measures is needed. Here, entropy is proposed as such a measure. The sensitivity of entropy is compared analytically to that of linear measures, deriving ranges in component values inside which entropy is guaranteed to be more sensitive than the linear measures. The analysis is complemented by computing the entropy in two children’s English speech for different categories of word complexity and comparing its sensitivity to that of linear measures. One of the children is a bilingual typically developing child at age 3;0 and the other child is a monolingual child with speech sound disorders at age 5;11. The analysis and applications demonstrate the usefulness of the measure for evaluating speech realizations and its relative advantages over linear measures.