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English for Children - Archive

Seminar Paper - from Helen Doron - Part 11

Does repeated listening to a Foreign Language create two separate phonological systems in monolingual 2-year-olds?

5. DISCUSSION

5.1 Differentiated and autonomous

Despite their clear Hebrew dominance, the Twolinguals seem to have two distinct phonological systems. This can be seen by the truncation patterns being distinct according to language. However, at the point of structural ambiguity, the Twolinguals interpreted the WSWS structure as a Hebrew one and truncated accordingly, indicating lack of autonomy between the phonological systems.

5.2 Further study

Firstly, the study should be repeated with a larger, more significant sample. Secondly, these children were interviewed after over two months of holiday in which they did not hear the cassettes very much. Despite the finding that the phonological systems are differentiated, it would be a good idea to repeat this study at some time during the children's second year of study, while they are more influenced by the hearing of the cassette in the background and the regular lessons. Thirdly, the tactics used in the UK seem to have been the most effective for evoking speech from the children efficiently and enjoyably. Lastly, despite the fact that the Twolinguals have separate phonological systems, they truncated English more than Hebrew, indicating that they are more comfortable in Hebrew.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CELCE-MURCIA, M. (1978). The simultaneous acquisition of English and French in a two-year-old child. In E. Hatch (Ed.), Second language acquisition: A book of readings (pp.38-53). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

De GROOT, A. (1993). Word-type effects in bilingual processing tasks: Support for a mixed-representational system. In R. Schreuder & B. Weltens (Eds.), The bilingual lexicon (pp.27-52). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

DEUCHAR, M., & CLARK, A. (1996). Early bilingual acquisition of the voicing contrast in English and Spanish. Journal of Phonetics, 24, 351-365.

DOEPKE, S. (1998). Competing language structures: The acquisition of verb placement by bilingual German-English children. Journal of Child Language, 25, 555-584.

DORON, H (2001) A Teacher Guide to More English For All Infants, Rationale, 6.

GENESEE F. (1989). Early bilingual development: One language or two? Journal of Child Language, 16, 161-180.

GENESEE, F., NICOLADIS, E., & PARADIS, J. (1995). Language differentiation in early bilingual development, Journal of Child Language, 22, 611-631.

GERKEN, L. (1994a). A metrical template account of children's weak syllable omissions from multi-syllabic words. Journal of Child Language, 21, 565-584.

GERKEN, L. ( 1994b). Young children's representation of prosodic phonology: Evidence from English-speakers' weak syllable productions. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 19-38.

GROSJEAN F (1995). A psycholinguistic approach to codeswitching: The recognition of guest words by bilinguals. In L. Milroy & P Muysken (Eds.), One speaker, two languages: Cross-disciplinary perspectives on codeswitching. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

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