Seminar Paper - from Helen Doron - Part 2

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

1.1 Autonomy

Paradis (2001) suggests that the “one system or two?” dichotomy concerning infant bilinguals is probably too simplistic. Indeed, she points out that adult bilinguals do not have separation of their phonological systems on all levels (De Groot, 1993; Paradis, M., 1997; Grosjean, 1995). She then goes on to ponder where it would be that crosslinguistic transfer would take place. Whereas there had been some study on the syntactic structures of bilingual infants (Paradis and Genesee, 1996/7; Mishina, 1997; Doepke, 1998; Hulk & van der Linden, 1996/8), the autonomy of bilingual infant development had not been explicitly studied. This was the basis for Paradis' study in 2001.

1.2 Paradis' study 2001

Paradis' research (2001) set out to study whether two year olds have differentiated phonological systems and if so, whether there exist crosslinguistic connections.

She studied 18 monolingual French-speaking two-year olds, 18 monolingual English-speaking two-year olds, and 17 bilingual French/English two year olds. Using nonsense words, according to the phonotactic and syllabification restraints of each language, divided into 4 syllables, she tested for:

1. word-truncation according to trochaic bias (English) versus iambic bias (French);
2. quantity sensitivity.

Paradis was testing the speech production of two year olds. Jusczyk, Culter and Redanz (1993) had found that 9 month old infants showed a clear preference for hearing SW (Strong-Weak syllable) words over WS (Weak-Strong syllable) words.

The results of Paradis 2001 study indicate:

1. bilingual two year olds have differentiated phonological systems;
2. phonological systems are not autonomous;
3. cross-lingual effects that appear in the truncation patterns of bilingual children seem to be where there is interlanguage structural ambiguity. Much of this seems influenced by the language dominance of the infants and by between-language stress variety.

2. PURPOSE OF RESEARCH

Based on the findings of Paradis, 2001, that two-year-old bilinguals have differentiated phonological systems with crosslingual effects, i.e. that are not autonomous, it is of interest to examine if monolingual children also develop differentiated phonological systems if exposed systematically to a foreign language. These monolingual children would start the exposure from the age of 12 – 20 months. The exposure would be in the form of audiocassettes / CD played in the background daily over about 9 months, while meeting once a week for a class in a small group with the teacher.