Seminar Paper - from Helen Doron - Part 6

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

3.4 Transcription and encoding

The recordings were transcribed by the author in phonetic (not phonological) transcription. Where unclear, the data was omitted. Data with children for Twolingual children who did not truncate at least half of the words in one of the languages were excluded. Data for monolingual children who did not truncate at least half the words were excluded. Average syllable length was calculated by the number of different length enunciations e.g., if a child repeated koameeganda twice, once as [kVwVmik@] and once as [kQgan], these will be treated as two separate enunciations. The decision on what syllable had been truncated was made according to the vowel quality, e.g. Dorin says , where the primary word stress is on the second syllable in the target word and the secondary stress on the last syllable; here the truncated syllable is recorded as being the second one because of the vowel quality. On the other hand, if the vowel quality does not seem to fit any of the syllables in debate, it will be decided according to syllable position word stress e.g. when Shahaf says , the presumption will be that the second syllable has been preserved. Where it was very hard to work out which syllable had been truncated because of no matching vowel quality, the nearest vowel was taken as in Amit's ; here the vowel seemed nearest the vowel of the third and not the second syllable. Where it just was not even possible to work out e.g. Gal's saying , the data was not included. Some of the children added syllables, e,g, Charlie's for and Jake's . In the case of the latter, it seems almost like a stutter in syllable repetition and that third syllable has been omitted. However, this type of data has been transcribed, but not included in the analysis of truncated words.

There was some phonetic variation in a few of the words between the different interviewers; however, it was only a slight vowel shift and as this was not the focus of this paper, it was not seen as important or even an influencing factor. The children's words were coded for the preservation by position scores for each syllable (first, second, third, fourth).