Abstract
This study aims to analyse facilitatory and inhibitory effects of bilingualism on first language acquisition of prosody. The speech rhythm produced by Spanish–English 2-, 4- and 6-year-old bilinguals was analysed acoustically and compared to adult and child monolingual baselines. Our results demonstrate that despite an even-timed bias for the production of vocalic materials also found for monolinguals, bilinguals do not show the anticipated uneven-timed bias in their consonant interval production. Bilinguals therefore follow a different developmental path from monolinguals with two rhythmically distinct languages at early stages of language acquisition. Rhythmic acquisition is characterized by language interaction, which leads to faster mastery of consonant interval durations, especially in the structurally more complex language, English. We argue that the interaction of languages in bilinguals and the subsequent transfer provides a developmental advantage to bilingual children leading to more fine-tuned motor control, and possibly more stable mental representations. We place the results in the context of the dynamic systems theory, which has the interaction of language subsystems as its main tenet.
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Notes
- 1.
Another possible explanation lies in the different rhythm metrics that were used in the studies: Kehoe and Lleó (2002) and Lleó et al. (2007) used the raw Pairwise Variability Index (rPVI-C), while Bunta and Ingram (2007) normalized the PVI (see methodology below for a discussion of rhythm metrics).
- 2.
Additionally, the frequency model struggles to account for individual variation.
- 3.
Note that rhythm metrics only provide a very crude approximation of the perceptual differences, which theorists have attempted to account for under the heading ‘rhythm class’, and that using metrics to assign individual languages to a rhythm class is not very fruitful (Barry et al. 2009; Arvaniti 2009, 2012). The relation between any acoustic measure of rhythm and the rhythm percept is indirect at best, not least because rhythm is multidimensional (cf. Grabe and Low 2002; Nolan and Asu 2009), and cued by phonetic parameters other than timing (e.g. Cumming 2010). Also, the acoustic differences that have been found between languages with different rhythm percepts suggest that they are gradient rather than categorical in nature, which seems to be at variance with the concept of ‘rhythm class’. Nevertheless, since the objective in this study is to reliably distinguish between speaker groups, rather than characterize or predict the precise nature of their rhythmic behavior, the metrics are a good tool to detect any systematic differences that may exist between the speaker groups.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Elinor Payne for the many insightful discussions we had on monolingual acquisition of prosody, which have played an important role in developing our thinking. We would also like to thank the children and parents in Cambridge and Madrid who have so kindly participated in this experiment. Finally, we would like to thank Runnymede College, Madrid, for generously providing us with the recording facilities, and especially Peter Rouco, who was indispensable in recruiting participants and ensuring the smooth running of the experiments.
This research project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Cambridge Home and Europe Scholarship Scheme.
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Schmidt, E., Post, B. (2015). Language Interaction in the Development of Speech Rhythm in Simultaneous Bilinguals. In: Delais-Roussarie, E., Avanzi, M., Herment, S. (eds) Prosody and Language in Contact. Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45168-7_13
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