Seminar Paper - from Helen Doron - Part 8

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

4. RESULTS

Preliminary analyses already proved problematic from several points of view:

4.1 Size and average age of the sample

Of the Hebrew monolingual 2-year-olds, only 3 out of 8 children agreed to talk at all. Of those three, all truncated. Of the Twolinguals, 9 out of 12 children talked and of those 9, 2 only cooperated in Hebrew, not English. As shown in Table 3, of the 7 that cooperated in both languages, the average syllables per word differed between the languages. This could be because of the clear Hebrew dominance.

Table 3 Average number of syllables per word for the Twolinguals

In the above table, only two of the Twolinguals qualify as truncating at least half the words in both languages, so we decided to use the data from those that truncated at least half the words in English, even though they truncated less in Hebrew.

This left us with four Twolinguals with an average age of 33 months. The Hebrew monolinguals that cooperated and truncated had an average age of 27 months. The English monolinguals that cooperated and truncated had an average age of 32 months.

4.2 Overall results

The English monolinguals truncated in accordance to the predicted patterns. That is:

1. the SW pattern being the dominant template in English, the pattern SWSW was hardly truncated with the monolinguals (truncation rate 0.13, i.e.13%). However, with the Twolinguals, the truncation rate for the SWSW pattern was 0.63. In Table 5, the SWSW pattern for the monolinguals is based on a very small sample. It is different from the pattern in the Paradis (2001) study. However, the Twolinguals in this study follow the same pattern as the monolinguals in the Paradis (2001) study. I predicted that the last two syllables would be the most likely to be preserved, rather than a three-syllable truncation. This was born out in the Twolingual data; it can be presumed that the sample for the monolinguals was too small.