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One sound system or two? : Evidence from one infant learning english and norwegian

University of British Columbia

To date, there is very little information about the early stages of bilingual language acquisition, and the information available is largely based on diary and anecdotal reports. In this thesis research the productions of one infant A, (1;9) learning English and Norwegian were analysed to provide information about the phonological system(s) acquired by a bilingual infant. Two issues where addressed; (1) whether an infant simultaneously acquiring two languages uses a single phonetic inventory or two separate systems, and (2) the effect a bilingual environment has on phonological acquisition. Speech productions were collected via audio recordings during free play, parental diary records and the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory: Infants f1 989). All data were used to analyse the infant's lexicon. Transcriptions of the recorded data were compared across language environments and target languages in terms of phonetic inventories, syllabic inventories and substitution patterns. At the lexical level, A took the language of the listener into account in that he used a higher proportion of English words in the English environment and a higher percentage of Norwegian words in the Norwegian environment. He did not differentiate phonetic production. A used a single phonetic inventory in his productions of English and Norwegian words. A crosslanguage influence was noted in his system, as it contained both English and Norwegian segments, such as [w], which is part of the English (but not the Norwegian) system, and [0], which occurs in Norwegian, but not English.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-01-28

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/3976

Audiology and Speech Sciences

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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