Volume 52, Issue 4

Nouns and verbs are considered as fundamental categories of lexical development, and there are contradicting views on the order of the acquisition. One view claims that nouns are acquired earlier than verbs and this primacy of nouns can be attributed to perceptual-conceptual constraints from a linguistic point of view, on the other hand, nouns and verbs are the lexical units which categorically highlight language-general and language-specific characteristics. These language-specific characteristics have motivated this research because of the different typological characteristics between Turkish and Dutch in terms of nouns and verbs. The aim of this study is two-fold: to investigate the Dutch and Turkish lexicon of Turkish-Dutch bilingual children with respect to noun-verb categories and to consider the role of gender. Our sample comprised 55 Turkish-Dutch bilingual children aged between 9 and 36 months. We found that age, language and gender are at play during early lexical development. Vocabulary develops after 12 months and nouns are prioritized over verbs both in comprehension and production.

Typical morpho-phonological measures of children’s speech realizations used in the literature depend linearly on their components. Examples are the proportion of consonants correct, the mean length of utterance and the phonological mean length of utterance. Because of their linear dependence on their components, these measures change in proportion to their component changes between speech realizations. However, there are instances in which variable speech realizations need to be differentiated better. Therefore, a measure which is more sensitive to its components than linear measures is needed. Here, entropy is proposed as such a measure. The sensitivity of entropy is compared analytically to that of linear measures, deriving ranges in component values inside which entropy is guaranteed to be more sensitive than the linear measures. The analysis is complemented by computing the entropy in two children’s English speech for different categories of word complexity and comparing its sensitivity to that of linear measures. One of the children is a bilingual typically developing child at age 3;0 and the other child is a monolingual child with speech sound disorders at age 5;11. The analysis and applications demonstrate the usefulness of the measure for evaluating speech realizations and its relative advantages over linear measures.

The cognitive benefits of bilingualism have an impact on the processing mechanisms that are active during the acquisition process in a way that results in language variation. Within bilingual populations, the notion of “language proximity” is also of key importance for deriving variation. Certain sociolinguistic factors can invest the process of language development and its outcome with an additional layer of complexity that results from the emergence of mesolectal varieties which blur the boundaries of grammatical variants. We report data on the acquisition and development of object clitic placement in the two varieties of Greek spoken in Cyprus, and on performance in executive control tasks by monolingual, bilectal, and bi-/multilingual children. Comparing findings across experiments, the present study identifies the different factors that define “bilectalism” within the greater context of multilingualism, merging sociolinguistic and neurocognitive insights about language variation and how they inform development in diglossic contexts that involve closely related varieties—a study in comparative linguality.

Acquisition of the Danish noun plural system is interesting in regard to testing hypotheses on input frequency effects: whereas English is characterized by having one default inflectional marker for a grammatical category (e.g. the plural suffix -s ) and a minor number of exceptions to this default rule, Danish has several competing inflectional markers. Furthermore, there are important interactions between phonology and morphology in the Danish system (Basbøll et al. (2011)). In the present study we test theses on input frequency effects in a phonological perspective and explore the impact of phonetics on grammar. This will be done in three types of empirical data from monolingual Danish children: Naturalistic child directed speech and child speech from six children aged 0;10–3;11; Structured interviews with 80 children aged 3–9 years; Experimental data from 160 children aged 3–10 years. We present a scale with three degrees of transparency of the plural stem and of the plural suffix as well as a more differentiated scale of transparency of the Danish plural markers. We furthermore present a scale with three degrees of productivity, and analyze the relation between acquisition rate and degree of transparency as well as degree of productivity.

Language-specific phonotactic restrictions modulate the perception of L1 and L2 sound structures. However, sonority-driven onset markedness is also known to affect listeners’ perception of onset clusters; onsets of large sonority distances elicit more accurate perception than those of small sonority distances (e.g., bl versus bd versus lb , Berent et al. 2007). Although English admits only onset sequences of a large sonority rise, certain prohibited onset clusters can emerge due to word-initial schwa deletion (e.g., banana [bnǽnə], potato [ptéɪɾoʊ]). The study investigated whether native and non-native listeners were perceptually sensitive to the sonority-based onset markedness as well as to legal versus illegal English onset clusters resulting from word-initial schwa deletion. Native English, Korean, and Japanese listeners completed identity judgment tests with auditory nonce words. The nonce words contained ill-formed as well as well-formed onsets resulting from initial schwa deletion and ill-formed onsets were further divided into onsets of a sonority rise, flat, and fall. The results of accuracy tests indicated that all the listener groups differentiated between well-formed and ill-formed English onset clusters and response latency showed a similar trend. The results also revealed that the listeners showed an illusionary vowel effect as a function of the onset markedness irrespective of their L1s.

This study aims to map native Dutch and non-native English vowels of Belgian children who have not been immersed and have not received instruction in English, but who are exposed to it through the media. It investigates to what extent this type of exposure is sufficient to develop new phonetic vowel categories. Twenty-four children aged 9–12 years performed production tasks focusing on Dutch and English monophthongs. Vowel formants were normalized and statistically analysed, and results highlight the English contrasts /ɛ–æ/, /ʊ–u/ and /ɒ–ɔ/, which are lacking in Dutch. The children produced contrasting /ɛ/ and /æ/ in F1 and F2 in a repetition task, and English /ɛ/ and /æ/ were considerably different from the closest Dutch vowel /ɛ/ in terms of anteriority. The children’s /ʊ–u/ and /ɒ–ɔ/ differed in F1 and F2. The closest Dutch vowel /u/ did not differ from English /u/, and differed from /ʊ/ only in F1. Dutch /ɔ/ differed from /ɒ/ in F1 and F2 and differed from English /ɔ/ in F1. The results suggest that media-induced Second Language Acquisition should not be underestimated, for even in contexts of L2 acquisition exclusively through media exposure, children learn to produce contrasts between L2 vowels which do not exist in their L1.

The purpose of this contribution is to give an account of the similarities or dissimilarities of the speech rhythm of Swedish and Albanian. In this study, temporal features were focused on to ascertain rhythmic differences between the two languages. The interest for this study arose when a clear rhythmic variation was observed in the accented Swedish L2 speech produced by L1-speakers of Albanian, namely the lack of attributes like reduction in unstressed syllables. It was thus hypothesised that speakers of L1-Swedish would produce larger variation in length of vocalic and/or consonantal intervals than L1-speakers of Albanian. The recorded material comprised read speech produced by seven L1-speakers of both languages. Various acoustic metrics were applied to analyse the rhythm. Results show differences between Swedish and Albanian speech for both non-normalised and normalised metrics only for the vocalic intervals, but with an unexpected outcome. In that way, larger length variation for vocalic intervals in the Albanian material than in the Swedish material was found. Therefore, the occurrence of reduction phenomena also in Albanian can be stated. These findings contradict the assumption that transfer from L1-Albanian was the reason for lack of reduction in L2-Swedish, as observed previously.