Acceleration in the bilingual acquisition of phonological structure: evidence from Polish–English bilingual children

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Tamburelli, M., Sanoudaki, E., Jones, G. ORCID: 0000-0003-3867-9947 and Sowinska, M., 2015. Acceleration in the bilingual acquisition of phonological structure: evidence from Polish–English bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18 (4), pp. 713-725. ISSN 1366-7289

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1366728914000716

Abstract

This study examines the production of consonant clusters in simultaneous Polish-English bilingual children and in language-matched English monolinguals (aged 7;01- 8;11). Selection of the language pair was based on the fact that Polish allows a greater range of phonologically complex cluster types than English. A nonword repetition task was devised in order to examine clusters of different types (obstruent-liquid vs. s + obstruent) and in different word positions (initial vs. medial), two factors that play a significant role in repetition accuracy in monolingual acquisition (e.g. Kirk & Demuth, 2005). Our findings show that bilingual children outperformed monolingual controls in the word initial s + obstruent condition. These results indicate that exposure to complex word initial clusters (in Polish) can accelerate the development of less phonologically complex clusters (in English). This constitutes significant new evidence that the facilitatory effects of bilingual acquisition extend to structural phonological domains.

Item Type:

Journal article

Publication Title:

Bilingualism: Language and Cognition

Creators:

Tamburelli, M., Sanoudaki, E., Jones, G. and Sowinska, M.

Publisher:

Cambridge University Press

Place of Publication:

Cambridge

Date:

2015