ERIC Number: EJ1328091
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2022-Feb
Pages: 23
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0142-7237
EISSN: N/A
Feature Generalization in Dutch-German Bilingual and Monolingual Children's Speech Production
Stoehr, Antje; Benders, Titia; van Hell, Janet G.; Fikkert, Paula
First Language, v42 n1 p101-123 Feb 2022
Dutch and German employ voicing contrasts, but Dutch lacks the 'voiced' dorsal plosive /g/. We exploited this accidental phonological gap, measuring the presence of prevoicing and voice onset time durations during speech production to determine (1) whether preliterate bilingual Dutch-German and monolingual Dutch-speaking children aged 3;6-6;0 years generalized voicing to /g/ in Dutch; and (2) whether there was evidence for featural cross-linguistic influence from Dutch to German in bilingual children, testing monolingual German-speaking children as controls. Bilingual and monolingual children's production of /g/ provided partial evidence for feature generalization: in Dutch, both bilingual and monolingual children either recombined Dutch voicing and place features to produce /g/, suggesting feature generalization, or resorted to producing familiar /k/, suggesting segment-level adaptation within their Dutch phonological system. In German, bilingual children's production of /g/ was influenced by Dutch although the Dutch phoneme inventory lacks /g/. This suggests that not only segments but also voicing features can exert cross-linguistic influence. Taken together, phonological features appear to play a crucial role in aspects of bilingual and monolingual children's speech production.
Descriptors: German, Indo European Languages, Phonology, Contrastive Linguistics, Speech Communication, Generalization, Preschool Children, Bilingualism, Monolingualism, Phonemes, Transfer of Training, Comparative Analysis, Acoustics, Phonetics, Foreign Countries
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Netherlands
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A