Seminar Paper - from Helen Doron - Part 9

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

1. As the analyses indicate that the bilinguals show evidence of a certain degree of language specific truncations patterns, and this differentiated phonological systems, the next stage is to see if there are signs of crosslingual effects or if the systems are autonomous. In Tables 9 and 10, we see the same patterns for the monolinguals and the Twolinguals in Hebrew. In Table 4, it can be seen that the English Twolinguals and monolinguals have an overall tendency to preserve the third syllable most. However, the Hebrew monolinguals tend to preserve the fourth syllable most. This can be seen as a cross-lingual effect. In addition, as predicted, the WSWS structure was ambiguous to the Twolinguals as ending in the dominant Hebrew word-final template. This can be seen as (i) it is the least truncated structure (0.5, whereas WSWW is 0.67, SSWW is 0.73, and SWSW is 0.63); and (ii) as the last two syllables are most dominant, whereas for the monolinguals the second and final syllables are most dominant. This would indicate that the Hebrew speakers perceive this as a Hebrew structure.
2. In Tables 9 and 10, the same pattern can be observed for both Hebrew monolinguals and Twolinguals. As in the Paradis (2001) study, where the simpler template of word final word stress in French with the third syllable receiving the second largest amount of preservation, was present as a pattern for both monolinguals and bilinguals, in the present study, the simply templates of Hebrew were preserved by both monolinguals and Twolinguals.

Table 4 General Patterns for all 4 word rhythms

Table 5 Comparison: English Monolinguals and Twolinguals – WS'WS

English Monolinguals – proportion of words truncated: 0.64

Twolinguals – proportion of words truncated: 0.5