The temporal organisation of speech in monolingual and bilingual children

Abstract

Research on the temporal organisation of speech with respect to age is extremely important as it may provide empirical confirmation for the various models of speech production. With the advancement of age, speech motor control becomes more secure, and so the child gradually approaches the level of articulation and speech tempo typical of adults. There have been numerous works published on the temporal relations of English-speaking, normally developing children; however, the relevant literature still lacks data on bilingual children. The present paper aims to fill this gap: it discusses the temporal organisation of speech in HungarianBulgarian bilingual children between the ages of 9 and 13 and monolingual children of the same age in a developmental perspective. The data on monolingual children in this paper also break new ground as only few papers have dealt with the speech rate of Hungarian children and none with that of Bulgarian children. ½º ÁÒØÖÓ Ù Ø ÓÒIn the process of acquiring language, the child learns to understand and produce the speech sounds, sound sequences, words, and syntactic structures of his language from which he constructs sentences and coherent utterances. As the child ages, his linguistic competence also improves, and as years go by, he becomes a skilled speaker-listener. By the age of three, the normally developing child is capable of correctly producing most speech sounds, talks a lot and does it with pleasure, and he frequently uses complicated syntactic structures (Downing-Valtin 1984). By the age of six, he has built a considerable vocabulary, and he develops the kind of language awareness that enables him to acquire written language, too. We can observe a high level of language awareness in 8-10-year-old children; in most cases, this is the age when foreign language teaching also begins. Although it is very similar to that of adults, the speech of 10-14-year-olds may show significant differences, typical of this age (for example, in the area of temporal relations), and so it may well be justified to refer to it as "teenage language" (Gósy 1999).

Bilingual and monolingual children’s articulation rates during nonword repetition tasks

“…She found a slower speech rate for bilingual compared to monolingual children at both age groups and in both languages. The results of both Trofimovich and Baker (2007) and Menyhárt (2002) are consistent with a large body of work on L2 adult speakers, which shows a gradual development of L2 articulation rate over time (Lennon, 1990; Munro & Derwing, 1995; Riggenbach, 1991).…”

“…Menyhárt (2002) also examined the speech rate of children who were born into bilingual environments. She compared Hungarian-Bulgarian bilingual children either aged 9–10 or 12–13 year olds to monolingual age-matched peers.…”

Learning prosody and fluency characteristics of second language speech: The effect of experience on child learners' acquisition of five suprasegmentals

“…In fact, compared to a sizeable body of research on the development of speech rate in monolingual children (e.g., Smith, Kenney, & Hussain, 1996), literature on speech rate in child L2 learners (or bilingual children) is small. To our knowledge, the only study examining the development of speech rate in child L2 learners is Menyhárt's (2002) investigation of temporal characteristics of speech in Hungarian and Bulgarian monolingual and bilingual 9-to 10-and 12-to 13-year-olds exposed to their L2 from early infancy. Menyhárt (2002) found that bilingual children produced L2 speech at a slower rate than aged-matched monolingual children, and that older children produced L2 speech at a faster rate than younger children.…”

“…To our knowledge, the only study examining the development of speech rate in child L2 learners is Menyhárt's (2002) investigation of temporal characteristics of speech in Hungarian and Bulgarian monolingual and bilingual 9-to 10-and 12-to 13-year-olds exposed to their L2 from early infancy. Menyhárt (2002) found that bilingual children produced L2 speech at a slower rate than aged-matched monolingual children, and that older children produced L2 speech at a faster rate than younger children. Although revealing, these findings likely characterize bilingual children's nearly simultaneous acquisition of two languages.…”

“…To date, only one study known to us has examined the development of speech fluency, as measured by frequency and duration of pauses, in child L2 learners (Menyhárt, 2002). Menyhárt observed that the bilingual children who were exposed to two languages from infancy did not differ in pause duration in their two languages from age-matched monolingual children, and that older children (bilingual and monolingual alike) produced speech with shorter pauses than younger children.…”