Bilingual Children’s Phonology Shows Evidence of Transfer, but Not Deceleration in Their L1

Abstract

Bilingual language development might be characterized by transfer, deceleration, and/or acceleration, the first two being relevant for the language impairment diagnosis. Studies on bilingual children’s productive phonology show evidence of transfer, but little is known about deceleration in this population. Here, we focused on phonological transfer and deceleration in L1 speech of typically developing Polish-English bilingual children of Polish migrants to the United Kingdom (aged 4.7–7). We analyzed L1 speech samples of 30 bilinguals and 2 groups of Polish monolinguals, matched to the bilinguals on age or vocabulary size. We found that bilingual children’ speech (both simultaneous and early sequential) was characterized by transfer, but not by deceleration, suggesting that while phonological deceleration phases out in children above the age of 4.7, transfer does not. We discuss our findings within the PRIMIR model of bilingual phonological acquisition (Curtin et al., 2011) and show their implications for SLT practices.

Advantages of visiting your home country: how brief reimmersion in their native country impacts migrants’ native language access

“…From the initial sample of 56 participants, we selected a subset of 37 participants such that they matched the migrant group as closely as possible on a set of critical measures: chronological age, age of L2 acquisition, socio-economic status (SES), language proficiency (the combined score of the LexTALE and Cambridge tasks) and self-assessed language switching behavior. The matching procedure was carried out using a brute force algorithm that we also used for a similar purpose in a previous study (Marecka et al, 2020). The groups had means within 1 SD of each matched variable (see Table 1 for the observed similarities and differences between the groups).…”

Glottalizing at word junctures: Exploring bidirectional transfer in child and adult Spanish heritage speakers

“…In fact, cross-linguistic interaction is not specific to adult heritage bilingualism. Utilizing the framework of early grammar interaction developed by Paradis and Genesee (1996), scholars have shown that the phonological grammars of bilingual speakers during early childhood demonstrate several characteristic features, including transfer (i.e., adoption of a property of language A into language B) (Dickinson, McCabe, Clark-Chiarelli, & Wolf, 2004;Erikson, 2016;Goldstein & Bunta, 2011;Lleó, 2018;Marecka, Wrembel, Otwinowska, Szewczyk, & Banasik-Jemielniak, 2020), deceleration (i.e., lower rate of acquisition when compared to monolinguals; Fabiano-Smith & Barlow, 2010;Kehoe, 2002;Kehoe, Lleó, & Rakow, 2004;Menke, 2018), and, to a lesser extent, acceleration (i.e., faster rate of acquisition when compared to monolinguals; Kehoe, Trujillo, & Lleó, 2001;Tamburelli, Sanoudaki, Jones, & Sowinska, 2015).…”