Feature generalization in Dutch–German bilingual and monolingual children’s speech production

Dutch and German employ voicing contrasts, but Dutch lacks the ‘voiced’ dorsal plosive /ɡ/. 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 /ɡ/ 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’... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Stoehr, Antje
Benders, Titia
van Hell, Janet G.
Fikkert, Paula
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
Reihe/Periodikum: Stoehr , A , Benders , T , van Hell , J G & Fikkert , P 2022 , ' Feature generalization in Dutch–German bilingual and monolingual children’s speech production ' , First Language , vol. 42 , no. 1 , pp. 101–123 . https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237211058937
Schlagwörter: speech production / phonological features / simultaneous bilinguals / cross-linguistic influence / preschoolers / Dutch / German
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-27415324
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
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Link(s) : https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/publications/f33422ae-b3d4-44a4-a1ff-879537913ea3

Dutch and German employ voicing contrasts, but Dutch lacks the ‘voiced’ dorsal plosive /ɡ/. 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 /ɡ/ 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 /ɡ/ provided partial evidence for feature generalization: in Dutch, both bilingual and monolingual children either recombined Dutch voicing and place features to produce /ɡ/, 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 /ɡ/ was influenced by Dutch although the Dutch phoneme inventory lacks /ɡ/. 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.