Accent/phonology in simultaneous bilinguals

[Goodman, Judith]

Sorry to the whole list who now know my parking woes.  I intended to reply to the message just below this one on my iPhone, but tapped too high - next time I'll put my glasses on!  My apologies!


On 8/31/11 9:54 AM, "Goodman, Judith" <GoodmanJC at health.missouri.edu> wrote:

Thanks for letting me know. I had a dentist appt this morning and now I'm waiting at the Parking Office because they've lost me from the system and did not issue me a new hangtag.  This is bureaucracy at it's worst.  It's the second time I've tried to fix it.  It seems obvious to me that they need to reenter it and send me on my way, but they can't seem to figure that out having already botched it twice and given me conflicting instructions today.  In other words, I should have been in 15 minutes ago, but I hope it will be in the next half hour.
--j.

On Aug 31, 2011, at 9:34 AM, "Katie Alcock" <k.j.alcock at lancaster.ac.uk<mailto:k.j.alcock at lancaster.ac.uk><mailto:k.j.alcock at lancaster.ac.uk>> wrote:

I'm wondering if anyone knows of any papers on phonological processing in simultaneous bilinguals, especially those whose exposure to each language is from native speakers (rather than those growing up in a bilingual environment with a lot of non-native speakers in one or both languages).

I'm asking because my two nieces (British father who is the main carer, Spanish mother) have noticeably non-British accents when speaking English, as well as some non-native phonology (e.g. b/v confusion, smaller range of vowels than I'd expect).

Almost no-one who is a non-native English speaker speaks English to them (except for a small amount in simple English lessons at school - they are 5 and 7). They do hear English of a variety of accents, but all their Spanish family and friends speak Castellano with them. I'd estimate they get about 75% exposure to Spanish, perhaps a little more (and more for the younger girl who gets more input from her older sister than vice versa).

At least for the older girl, comprehension is at an age-appropriate level; she makes some non-native-like sentence-level errors but they are not too dissimilar to a slightly younger monolingual (he/she confusion, question word order problems). I'm not sure about perception of contrasts but this is one of the more noticeable things about her production.

I'm very curious about accent in children in this kind of context; the data from infants would lead us to assume that once contrasts have been acquired in perception, so long as some exposure continues, they are not lost and by implication should also be present in production. Perhaps this is one of those assumptions that has no basis in fact!

Thanks

Katie Alcock




Katie Alcock, DPhil, CPsychol
Lecturer
Department of Psychology
Lancaster University
Fylde College
Lancaster
LA1 5EB
UK
Tel: +44 (0) 1524 593833


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