bilingual babbling?

[Barbara Pearson]

Dear Carol,

There is interesting material on bilingual babies' perception of  
their two languages, which you will find reviewed in articles by  
Janet Werker (in McCardle & Hoff, 2006, and Applied Psycholinguistics  
2007, volume 28 (3)). (I report on it a little in an article in the  
forthcoming Cambridge Handbook of Child Language, edited by Edith  
Bavin.)  The psycholinguistic methodologies show pretty clearly that  
bilingual babies can distinguish the phonetic/ phonemic  
characteristics of their two languages "prelinguistically."  Whether  
they can reproduce the differences reliably--again prelinguistically-- 
is still open to debate.  But your student should know that there is  
debate.  Our student Ana Navarro summarized various positions in the  
introduction to her dissertation, part of which is in the ISB4 volume.

Navarro, A., Pearson, B. Z., Cobo-Lewis, A.B., & Oller, D. K.  
(2005).   Differentiation in early phonological adaptation?   In J.  
Cohen, K. McAlister, K. Rolstad, & J. MacSwan (Eds.) ISB4:  
Proceedings of the 4 th International Symposium on Bilingualism (pp. 
1690-1702).   Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Your student's question about mixing the elements of both languages  
depends on the prior question of when babies can be said to have  
elements of both languages to mix.  There are claims to the contrary-- 
and we think we see some movement away from universal tendencies in  
production by 11 months--but we think the common claim to hear babies  
babbling in different languages (bilinguals, or monolinguals in  
different languages) depends on a combination of expectation on the  
part of the hearer and the production of early words interspersed in  
the babbling, which persists for quite some time.

Ana's experiment used early words produced by children 26 months old,  
and with children that old, listeners were barely able to distinguish  
the language the child was using when they didn't have the lexical  
information to guide them.  That is not prelinguistic and it doesn't  
mean that there might not be some nascent tendencies toward  
differentiation in the acoustics of the speech signal, but the ears  
*of people who don't know which language they are hearing* don't  
reliably pick the differences out. (Until computers, it was hard to  
remove language context in the tapes people used for the studies.) In  
words (again not babbling), we and others have noted some intrusion  
of one language in the other, but apparently much less than in the  
popular idea illustrated in your example.  There are also dominance  
patterns, as you mention, so some children, even simultaneous  
bilinguals, do show the patterns of only one language.  Ana worked  
with Spanish and English, which may be more similar than French and  
Chinese, but they are nonetheless rhythmically very different.

Some of the people studying the acquisition of Chinese tones can also  
weigh in here about how soon after the onset of canonical babbling  
Chinese children use different tonal patterns.  But there's my two- 
cents.

Till soon,

Barbara


On Feb 6, 2008, at 11:21 AM, Carol Slater wrote:

>
> Dear All--
> After a discussion of the influence of local language on babbling,  
> a student asked whether anything was known about babbling in babies  
> who heard two languages regularly. Would they show both influences,  
> e.g., produce French sounds with Chinese tonal differences? Settle  
> for one of the languages? Does anybody have a clue? Many thanks for  
> any information (or reassurance that we don't really know much  
> about it).
> Carol Slater
> Alma College
> Alma MI 48801
>
> >



********************************************************
Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph. D.
Depts. of Linguistics and Communication Disorders
Research Associate, Coordinator
South College 226
University of Massachusetts
Amherst MA 01003

413.545.5023
fax: 545.2792

bpearson at research.umass.edu
http://www.umass.edu/aae/bp_indexold.htm/



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