Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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It has often been found that bilingualism has a negative effect on children’s nonword repetition (NWR) performance (e.g., Kohnert et al., 2006; Windsor et al., 2010; Engel, 2011). There are two...Show moreIt has often been found that bilingualism has a negative effect on children’s nonword repetition (NWR) performance (e.g., Kohnert et al., 2006; Windsor et al., 2010; Engel, 2011). There are two types of NWR tasks: language-specific tasks based on the phonology of a specific language and tasks based on a more universal phonology. Previous studies have found some evidence of phonological transfer in bilingual children on language-specific NWR tasks (see Lee & Gorman, 2013; Sorenson Duncan & Paradis, 2016). Performance on a quasi-universal task relies less on language-specific knowledge. Therefore, we would expect less phonological transfer in this task. The present study extends previous research by comparing 22 monolingual and 81 bilingual children (aged 2-4) on two NWR tasks: a language-specific task based on the phonology of Dutch and a task based on a quasi-universal phonology. The present study examines the effects of bilingualism on performance and error patterns in the two NWR tasks. This study also aims to discover whether the additional errors made by bilingual children on either task can be explained by phonological transfer. The most important finding was that there are clear differences between the performance and error patterns of the two groups of children. Bilingual children produce more errors in general, and particularly more vowel substitutions and omission errors. Some of the additional errors produced by bilingual children may indeed be attributed to phonological transfer, but only on the language-specific NWR task. This highlights the benefits of using a quasi-universal NWR task in the assessment of bilingual children.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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The current thesis investigates the preference of Dutch monolingual infants for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Our study is a contribution to the ManyBabies 1...Show moreThe current thesis investigates the preference of Dutch monolingual infants for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Our study is a contribution to the ManyBabies 1 project (Bergmann et al., 2018), which is the first large-scale replication project in infant research. We use the head-turn preference procedure and test all the infants at the age of 8-12 months with the stimuli in North American English. We hypothesize that the infants in the present study prefer IDS to ADS because of IDS exaggerated prosodic properties. The linguistic content of the stimuli is not available to the infants because the stimuli are in English, a language they have not been exposed to before. Moreover, we want to find out if there is any difference between younger (8-month-olds) and older infants (11-month-olds). Previous research has demonstrated that younger infants show a more reliable preference for IDS over ADS in comparison with older infants. We statistically analyze the results using a linear-mixed effects model because of its advantages such as taking into consideration random variables and dealing well with non-normal data.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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This thesis explores the abstract rule learning mechanism as proposed by Marcus et al. (1999). While Marcus et al. (1999) indicated that 7-month-old infants can recognize and generalize rule-like...Show moreThis thesis explores the abstract rule learning mechanism as proposed by Marcus et al. (1999). While Marcus et al. (1999) indicated that 7-month-old infants can recognize and generalize rule-like patterns (i.e., ABA or ABB patterns) in linguistic input, Saffran et al. (2007) showed that infants can also learn rules from visual input. This thesis aims to investigate whether visual rule learning is still connected to language in the form of lexical knowledge, as rule learning could be facilitated by familiarity with the label pertaining to a visual object. To explore this notion, Saffran et al. (2007) is replicated with 12- to 14-month-old infants, using socks with different colour schemes as the stimuli, since the word sock should be familiar to the participants. Furthermore, the role of within-stimulus variety between A and B items is explored by comparing the results from the current study to Van Leeuwen (2016), who used entirely different objects as A and B items in a similar experiment.Show less
