Monolingual and bilingual children's processing of coarticulation cues during spoken word recognition.

Autor: Desmeules-Trudel F; Department of Linguistics, University of Ottawa.; Department of Psychology (Brain and Mind Institute), University of Western Ontario., Moore C; Department of Psychology, Duke University., Zamuner TS; Department of Linguistics, University of Ottawa.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Journal of child language [J Child Lang] 2020 Nov; Vol. 47 (6), pp. 1189-1206. Date of Electronic Publication: 2020 May 06.
DOI: 10.1017/S0305000920000100
Abstrakt: Bilingual children cope with a significant amount of phonetic variability when processing speech, and must learn to weigh phonetic cues differently depending on the cues' respective roles in their two languages. For example, vowel nasalization is coarticulatory and contrastive in French, but coarticulatory-only in English. In this study, we extended an investigation of the processing of coarticulation in two- to three-year-old English monolingual children (Zamuner, Moore & Desmeules-Trudel, 2016) to a group of four- to six-year-old English monolingual children and age-matched English-French bilingual children. Using eye tracking, we found that older monolingual children and age-matched bilingual children showed more sensitivity to coarticulation cues than the younger children. Moreover, when comparing the older monolinguals and bilinguals, we found no statistical differences between the two groups. These results offer support for the specification of coarticulation in word representations, and indicate that, in some cases, bilingual children possess language processing skills similar to monolinguals.
Databáze: MEDLINE