Previous studies have shown that preschool bilingual children lag behind same-aged monolinguals in their production of correct past tense forms. This lag has been attributed to bilinguals' less frequent exposure to either language. If so, bilingual children acquire the past tense like monolinguals, only later. In this study, we compared the…

The goal of this study was to examine the extent to which bilingual speakers maintain language-specific phonological contrasts for homorganic stops when a cue is shared across both languages. To this end, voice onset time (VOT) was investigated in three groups of participants: early bilinguals speakers of Canadian French and Canadian English (n =…

Three studies that examine the development of phonological awareness in monolingual and bilingual children K-2. In the first study, monolingual and bilingual children performed equally well on a complex task requiring phoneme substitution. The second replicated these results and demonstrated a significant role for the language of literacy…

Explores the effects of the relationship between exposure to two languages in childhood and metalinguistic abilities. Arabic-speaking children who had been exposed to both spoken and literary Arabic were compared to Russian-Hebrew bilinguals and Hebrew monolinguals. Subjects were kindergarten students; they were tested on language arbitrariness,…

Presents longitudinal case studies of the successive phonological acquisition of two Cantonese-English bilingual children, aged 2;3 to 3;1 years and 2;9 to 3; and 5 years. Children were assessed at four-week intervals. Phoneme-acquisition data and phonological process data revealed that both children had separate phonological systems for the two…

Attempts to determine whether broadened linguistic experience facilitates cross-language phonetic sensitivity to a novel speech contrast. Multilingual adults and monolingual English speaking adults were compared on their ability to make phonetic distinctions not found in their respective native languages. Broad, nonspecific linguistic experience…

Discusses two monolingual Spanish-speaking patients who were able to read words but showed great difficulty reading nonwords, a pattern of behavior known as phonological dyslexia. Contradicts the hypothesis that lexical reading is not an option for Spanish readers, because Spanish orthography is highly irregular, and supports the view that…

This study investigated phonological translation using a task designed to measure children's ability to map one phonological system onto another. Kindergarten and second-grade monolingual and bilingual students were evaluated. Results suggest that monolinguals generally performed poorly. Phonological translation is proposed as a tool with which to…