Seminar Paper - from Helen Doron - Part 7

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

3.5 Predictions (Based on Paradis, 2001)

1. I predicted that the monolinguals would each truncate the target words in accordance to the most common target template (Gerken 1994a, 1994b). For English, this is the trochaic SW structure and for Hebrew, it is word final stress which, in the common two-syllabic Hebrew word, is equivalent to the WS structure. In all languages, stressed syllables and final syllables can be expected to be preserved most of the time because of prosodic and universal perceptual factors. (Paradis, 2001). In English, however, wherever there is SW, this is the template that could be expected to be preserved, e.g. in WS'WS words, the S'W part could be expected to be preserved. We would add to that the universal tendency to preserve final syllables. In Hebrew, the tendency to preserve the word-final syllable, together with the universal tendency to preserve final syllables, would bring us to conclude that the last two syllables are most likely to be preserved. In the Paradis (2001) study which compared French and English which have very little resemblance in their word stress templates (French always has word final stress), the contract was very clear and easy to study. Although Hebrew also has the SW structure, the contrast with English should still be clear enough with the SW as the most common template.
2. In the Paradis study (2001), there was a prediction concerning bilingual children: that is if the bilingual children have differentiated phonological systems, they should have two separate truncation patterns – one for each language. The same prediction holds in this study for the Twolinguals, who have been systematically exposed to the sounds of English, although they are limited in vocabulary and opportunities to produce the language.
3. If they show signs of differentiation, then the author can examine to what extent the two systems are autonomous. The crosslinguistic effects can be expected to be found where there is structural ambiguity between the two languages. As discussed before, these ambiguities are numerous between Hebrew and English. One would predict that the crosslinguistic effects are most likely to occur in the WSWS English structure which corresponds to the word-final Hebrew structure. And if English words were heard as Hebrew words, which they could be if the secondary stress occurs on the first syllable in Hebrew, we may then see a greater preference for first syllable preservation in bilinguals than in monolinguals.