25.4699, Review: Language Acquisition: Liu (2014)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-25-4699. Fri Nov 21 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.4699, Review: Language Acquisition: Liu (2014)

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Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 14:36:54
From: Jonathan Clenton [j.clenton at reading.ac.uk]
Subject: The Effects of Bilingualism on Infant Language Development

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-539.html

AUTHOR: Liquan  Liu
TITLE: The Effects of Bilingualism on Infant Language Development
SUBTITLE: The Acquisition of Sounds and Words
SERIES TITLE: LOT Dissertation series
PUBLISHER: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT)
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Jonathan Clenton, University of Reading

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

This book is intended for psycholinguists, phonologists, and researchers on
bilingualism and infant studies. It discusses the influence of bilingualism on
infant sound and word acquisition in the first two years of life, and examines
whether monolingual and bilingual infants follow the same language development
trajectory. The book is the author’s PhD dissertation, and begins with a
handsome collection of acknowledgements, the number of which this reviewer has
never encountered in a single volume before. The eight chapters follow the
form of a standard experimental PhD dissertation: Chapter One introduces the
dissertation, Chapters Two to Seven consist of the five experiments, and
Chapter Eight consists of a summary and conclusion. 

Chapter One (“Bilingual infants’ phonological and vocabulary development”)
begins by defining the volume’s central themes of ‘bilingual’ and
‘bilingualism’ and raises broad issues related to infant speech development
for both mono- as well as bilingual infants. This first chapter considers
themes central to the dissertation’s two aims (phonological development:
including vowels, and tone; vocabulary development: associative word learning
in terms of age of development). There is closing discussion of the advantages
and disadvantages of bilingualism in infancy. The author presents balanced
discussion related to the relative merits of bilingualism, suggesting that
multiple influences such as setting affect this very complex area, and implies
that advantages can become disadvantages and vice versa. This first chapter
also discusses potential language dominance effects, as well as models of
speech perception and language acquisition, in terms of their potential for
bilingual language development. The chapter ends with an overview of the
remaining sections of the dissertation, as well as a consideration of
important questions that fall outside its scope. 

Chapter Two (“Monolingual and bilingual infant consonant perception”) presents
a study on bilingual infants’ perception of consonants. The study examines
whether bilingual and mono-lingual infants (5-15 months of age) follow similar
developmental trajectories in their ‘Voice Onset Time’ (VOT) perception of
consonants. VOT is defined as the length of time between the release of
closure of a stop and the onset of voicing. The author finds that initial
sensitivity and language environment shape both monolingual and bilingual
infants’ VOT perception. Tt 5-6 months  bilingual infants demonstrate an
initial sensitivity to both short-lag vs. long-lag as well as short-lag vs.
long-lead contrasts just like the monolinguals in the study; however, at 6-12
months, performances vary. This difference, between the monolingual and
bilingual infants, is ascribed to degree of exposure (DoE), which the author
suggests is crucial for infant speech perception. The chapter closes with
suggestions for future studies, including the need for studies with a larger
sample size. 

Chapter Three (“Monolingual and bilingual infant vowel perception”) examines
infant sensitivity to speech sounds. The experiment in this chapter explores
infant sensitivity to vowel discrimination. The author presents a study that
compares monolinguals and bilingual performance discrimination and perception
of the /i-I/ contrast. The findings show that the monolingual infants are not
able to discriminate between the /i-I/ contrast until after 9 months of age.
Bilingual infants, however, are not able to discriminate the contrast at 5-6
months, but show some sensitivity between 6 and 8 months. The author suggests
that the bilingual infants demonstrate an enhanced acoustic sensitivity, but
also warns against assuming that this is an advantage because this may not
help in categorising sounds. Conversely, the author suggests that the
bilingual infants often delayed in speech sound discrimination, which,
accordingly, might relate to bilingual speech development. In this specific
regard, the author implies that such heightened acoustic sensitivity might
have a negative effect on speech sound normalisation for bilinguals. The
chapter closes by proposing that future research examine differences between
monolingual infants and bilingual infants with regard to acoustic sensitivity.

Chapter Four (“Monolingual and bilingual infant tone perception”) presents an
experiment that compares monolingual and bilingual infants’ ability to
discriminate non-native tonal contrasts. The comparison appears to show that
non-tonal learning infant trajectory is U-shaped, with perceptual toning
occurring at an early age, sensitivity deteriorating at 8-9 months, but
recovering at around 11-12 months for bilingual infants, and 17-18 months for
monolingual infants. The author hypothesises that this recovery is likely
caused by the non-tonal learning infants’ failed attempt at native category
formation and/ or native intonation acquisition. In short, the study reveals
two unique perceptual patterns: tonal perception is continuous and plastic
across development, and acoustically salient contrasts undergo perceptual
toning (the gradual acquisition of tonal perception) to a lesser extent
whereas less salient ones are subject to it. The chapter closes by proposing
that future research test more contrasts in order to further clarify claims
made within this chapter. 

Chapter Five (“Monolingual and bilingual infants’ word learning of a
non-native contrast”) examines monolingual and bilingual infants’ lexical
development through associative word learning. The study examines the extent
to which 14-15 and 17-18 month old monolingual and bilingual infants perform
in a non-native tonal word learning task, and whether there is any
identifiable difference between monolingual and bilingual perception along the
developmental trajectory. The findings appear to demonstrate that monolingual
and bilingual infants present similar word learning patterns across age, with
no indication of bilingual delay. Both the monolingual and the bilingual
infants were able to construct a sound-object association at 14-15 months, but
not at 17-18 months which is likely due, according to the author, to
acoustics. The author proposes that future studies ‘look deeper into this
issue’ (p.120). 

Chapter Six (“The development of vocabulary comprehension and production in
monolingual and bilingual infants: a Communicative Developmental Inventory
(CDI) study”) targets the vocabulary acquisition of monolingual and bilingual
infants. The study investigates monolingual and bilingual infants at ages
11-12, 14-15, and 17-18 months in terms of word comprehension and word
production with a CDI. The CDI employed was an adapted questionnaire (parents
completed responses with their children) with 536 items of which 434 were
vocabulary items.  The results, in agreement with other literature, found
significant differences in comprehension, with larger vocabularies overall in
the bilingual infant subjects. The author also suggests that there is no
observable delay shown in early bilingual vocabulary development. The chapter
closes with five potentially worthwhile avenues of further research, the first
of which highlights the need to study the threshold of lexical entries by
exploring rapid word learning studies. 

Chapter Seven (“Parents’ estimates of degree of language exposure: The
bilingual / Multilingual infant questionnaire”) discusses degree of exposure
(DoE) from the perspective of the parent along with a comparison with
literature, and the results from a (Bilingual/ Multilingual Infant
Questionnaire (MIQ)). The results appear to indicate that the parents are
broadly aware of the language exposure of their children. The author also
compares the parents in terms of their educational history (whether high or
average education), and suggests that the parents with ‘average educational
backgrounds’ were less accurate in their estimations than their high
educational background counterparts. The author suggests that further research
explore such differences, and definitely take the parental education level
into consideration.

Chapter Eight (“Summary and Conclusion”) summarizes the central findings of
the experimental chapters (2-7), integrates these findings into the main
theoretical proposals of the dissertation/ volume, and poses questions for
future research, as well as considerations related to infant research in
general. The chapter ends with an exploration of the findings future research
needs to consider and is tempered by reasserting that, as each individual
child is unique, research should be cautious in stating general claims, and
when dealing with high variation, individual developmental paths should be
studied separately. 

EVALUATION

Liu has clearly contributed to the research on the effects of bilingualism on
infant language development. The book represents a substantial overview of
work within this area, particularly, as is its aim, work on the acquisition of
sounds and words. This is a PhD dissertation and should be read as such; Liu
should receive credit for collating what is clearly a considerable amount of
experimental research. 

For the most part, the text is clearly written, in language that is broadly
accessible (there were a few occasions where I had to retrace my steps to
remind myself what a particular acronym related to), and provides detailed
explanation of the experiments conducted. The volume might provide a useful
reference for the procedures Liu adopted in experimentation, and certainly
provides a useful grounding for any such future studies. The studies were
executed within the Dutch context, and the bilingual subjects were exposed to
Dutch plus one other language. It would be revealing for subsequent research
to be conducted in other contexts, perhaps beyond Europe even, to determine
whether the findings presented here could be extended elsewhere or, indeed, to
determine the extent to which conclusions might be applied to a variety of
different L1s and L2s. The author is correct to present the caveat that the
studies in this volume should be treated with caution, particularly given the
variation in dealing with such young learners. It would help if the
experiments reported here could somehow inform best practice. 

As the book is basically a PhD dissertation, it should not be considered a
manual on ‘how to’ raise a child with two languages. I am both a linguist with
an interest in bilingualism, and a parent of a child raised as a bilingual. I
found the content more relevant to my linguistic role than my parent role. The
appeal of the book rests in its academic content rather than in any
suggestions about the approaches to adopt in raising a bilingual infant. 

Overall, while this is a well written dissertation, it should not be
considered a ready resource for the lay person on the effects of bilingualism
on infant language development.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Jon Clenton works at the department of English Language and Applied
Linguistics, at Reading University in the UK. His current research focuses on
vocabulary testing, bilingual vocabulary development, and the testing of young
bilingual learners' vocabulary.








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