The discussion on the existence of a bilingual advantage in executive functioning is still going on to this day. But even if this advantage does exist, can we speak of a true advantage? In other...Show moreThe discussion on the existence of a bilingual advantage in executive functioning is still going on to this day. But even if this advantage does exist, can we speak of a true advantage? In other words, how does this advantage resonate in real-life? This study translated executive functions into real-world competences and tested whether bilinguals score better on these as well as on their school performances. Results show very little to no evidence of the existence of a bilingual advantage in real life. The most likely explanations are that there either is no advantage or the advantage is very small and therefore masked by other factors influencing executive functioning and bilingualism.Show less
Following Gulian (2017), this study examined the acquisition of onset consonant clusters in Dutch-speaking children against a theoretical model of speech production to investigate whether child...Show moreFollowing Gulian (2017), this study examined the acquisition of onset consonant clusters in Dutch-speaking children against a theoretical model of speech production to investigate whether child-specific forms could be accounted for by the developing speech production mechanism. Moreover, a new research technique, called prompted self-monitoring, was used to tap into children’s knowledge of phonetic standards with respect to various onset consonant cluster types. Comparisons were made between children’s onset cluster realizations before and after a non-specific prompt for self-repair (i.e. hm?) to examine whether children would improve toward the adult-model and reveal more knowledge of adult-like phonetic standards in the prompted repetition than in their initial, spontaneous repetition. The results indeed revealed improvements, showing a hidden potential, but also deteriorations and no changes. Attempts were made to explain these changes and no changes in relation to the speech mechanism of the young, developing speaker.Show less
Many experiments in the linguistic, auditory and visual field have been carried out to investigate the rule learning abilities of infants. However, many of these results seem contradictive and fail...Show moreMany experiments in the linguistic, auditory and visual field have been carried out to investigate the rule learning abilities of infants. However, many of these results seem contradictive and fail to draw a clear picture of the rule learning abilities of seven-month-olds. In the present study we aim to replicate the study of Marcus et al. (1999), which forms the basis of all rule learning research in past two decades. Since in a previous experiment, carried out in our lab, infants failed to extract a pattern when using stimuli with high variability, we hypothesized that infants might be distracted by high variability, indicating that the low variability in Marcus’ study might facilitate rule learning in seven-month-olds. The motivation to carry out the current experiment was to find an explanation for our failed experiment. Therefore we decided to replicate Marcus et al. (1999) to find out if infants need stimuli with low variability to extract rules. In the current experiment we tested seven-month-old Dutch infants using Marcus’ stimuli. Infants were tested with the Head-turn Preference Procedure. No significant results were found, so we could not replicate the results obtained by Marcus et al. (1999), and we are not able not able to draw any conclusions about the importance of variability of the phonological content. The outcome of this experiment suggests that more research should be done to find out what the actual rule learning abilities of seven-month-olds are.Show less
In the present study I expand on existing studies on syllabic patterns in babbling in two ways. First, I present two large-scale studies of babbling patterns from, respectively, eight and nine...Show moreIn the present study I expand on existing studies on syllabic patterns in babbling in two ways. First, I present two large-scale studies of babbling patterns from, respectively, eight and nine different languages. Second, I analyse babbling patterns – the “phonetic syntax” of babbling (Lipkind et al., 2013) – beyond the terms ‘reduplicated’ and ‘variegated’; a sequence “babadi”, for example, could be an example of either reduplicated or variegated babbling, and possible subpatterns become even more complex when considering four-syllable utterances. The conclusion is that that full variegation is preferred over any other form of reduplication in 0-24-months-olds – XY, XYZ, and XYZW. When infants do reduplicate they prefer to do so at the end of the utterance. From a cross-linguistic point of view it can be concluded that Polish and Germanic speaking infants use variegated patterns more frequently than infants of other languages. As regards to reduplicated patterns, languages such as French, Portuguese and Romanian have the highest distribution of reduplication. With regard to development of distribution of the syllabic patterns within the first two years of life, variegated utterances are produced at the very beginning of babbling and the frequency in which they occur increases while the infants grow older.Show less
