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
The goal of this paper is to examine the extent to which the language proficiency of parental input can be related with what kind of bilingual children’s language acquisition. The research objects...Show moreThe goal of this paper is to examine the extent to which the language proficiency of parental input can be related with what kind of bilingual children’s language acquisition. The research objects were bilingual children (1.5 - 9 years old) who have been exposed to two languages either from birth (simultaneous) or within the preschool years (successive). The literature was re-examined from a perspective of the input quality. The purpose was to use the already existing data to assess different qualities of input, where they were classified in terms of the uniform standardized language proficiency levels of the CEFR. The main findings are: (1) A2 level of CEFR could be seen as the threshold point of input quality; input proficiency at A2 or below A2 level of CEFR is so- called “low proficiency” and has little or no impact on bilingual acquisition; input proficiency above A2 can have an increasingly significant impact on language acquisition of bilingual children, except “mixing” (one sentence with words from two languages). (2) The language input quality with “mixing” or “low proficiency”, could not effectively stimulate language acquisition of bilingual children for them to be able to keep pace with their monolingual peers. Moreover, (3) native input might not always be the best, but it will always be positive for bilingual acquisition.Show less
