Voice onset time measurements were conducted on labial plosive pronunciations of English and Dutch children between the ages of 0;11.04 - 4;00.02 in a longitudinal spoken child language corpus....Show moreVoice onset time measurements were conducted on labial plosive pronunciations of English and Dutch children between the ages of 0;11.04 - 4;00.02 in a longitudinal spoken child language corpus. This was done to see whether there is a covert contrast between the participants’ correctly and incorrectly pronounced bilabial plosives. A pairwise t-test showed that there is a covert contrast between what English children intended as [pᑋ] and what they intended as [b], although these two forms were both transcribed by adults as [b]. Similarly, a pairwise t-test showed that there is a covert contrast between what Dutch children intended as [ ̬b] and what they intended as [p], although these two forms were both transcribed by adults as [p]. It was also found that while English and Dutch participants both reverted to a short-lag labial plosive, the VOT values of these short-lag plosives did not overlap between the languages.Show less
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
