Seminar Paper - from Helen Doron - Part 5

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

1. However, during Stage 1, both experimenters in Israel observed that it seemed that the presence of the parent or caretaker inhibited the performance of the Twolinguals and monolinguals – this is a different observation to the one Paradis makes. Also both experimenters felt that the toys and pictures hindered rather than helped and it was felt that the caretaker also impeded the child's communication and cooperation with the experimenter. It was noticed that when a prize was offered as motivation e.g. “I'll show you your picture on this digital camera if you say these words.” The children tended to cooperate better. From this was born Stage 2.
2. Stage 2: As in Stage 1, the Israeli experimenter met with each child mostly without a caretaker in a kindergarten or in a home setting. All conversations were recorded. A native Hebrew-speaking experimenter was used with the Hebrew words and a native English-speaker was used with the English words. However, this time, the child was told that if he said the words, he would get a page of stickers. No visual props were used to elicit the language. The UK interviewer got the best results interviewing in each child's home with the mother present; here all the children cooperated. In addition, she created a situation where the children had a magic wand and waved it while saying the magic word (one of the nonsense words) in order to magic himself a sticker. After each word said, the children received an attractive sticker. The children loved it and did not want to stop. When interviewing in the kindergarten, none of the children cooperated.

In both cases, the Twolinguals were tested twice – once for Hebrew and once for English. The setting was not in the Twolinguals home, as with the bilinguals of the Paradis article (2001), but in a kindergarten or a home or learning centre with the HD English teacher present or in the vicinity.

Please note, with the Twolinguals, when they were interviewed in English, as these are children who have been systematically exposed to English on audiocassette over a year on a daily basis, their vocabulary is limited and they are clearly more comfortable talking in Hebrew. So, in order to make them feel at ease and in order to be understood, the experimenter used Hebrew to communicate with them, mixed with simple English vocabulary that she knew was in the syllabus the children had learnt the previous year. Another point to take into account is that the children were all interviewed after the summer holiday break and after what was probably a break in the regular hearing patterns of the audio material at home.