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In:Multilingual Acquisition and Learning: An ecosystemic view to diversity
Edited by Elena Babatsouli
[Studies in Bilingualism 67] 2024
► pp. 324–345

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Chapter 12
Variation in phonological and morphosyntactic development in multilingual pre-schoolers

 | Molloy University
 | City University of New York Graduate Center
 | City University of New York Graduate Center
Published online: 30 May 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.67.12bar
Abstract
The present chapter investigates how the quantity of input and the linguistic characteristics of the Heritage Language (HL), Spanish or Russian, impact the comprehension of English Subject-Verb Agreement (SVA) (Study 1) and the production of English vowels (Study 2). In both HLs, SVA exhibits more contrastive forms than in English. Study 1 demonstrates that this HL characteristic facilitates the comprehension of English SVA by bilingual preschoolers, more so than the percentage of exposure to English. In contrast, both HLs exhibit a smaller and phonetically different vowel inventory compared to English. Study 2 demonstrates that the exact vowel inventory of the HL combined with amount of English exposure helped to explain the acoustic characteristics of the productions of bilingual Spanish-English and Russian-English preschoolers. These results have clinical and educational relevance.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Ecological considerations
  • 3.Phonological and morphosyntactic features under investigation
    • 3.1Subject-verb agreement in English, Spanish and Russian
    • 3.2English, Spanish and Russian vowels
  • 4.Comprehension of subject-verb agreement
    • 4.1Introduction
    • 4.2Participants
    • 4.3Methods and procedure
    • 4.4Results
    • 4.5Spanish-English bilingual results and discussion
    • 4.6Russian-English bilingual results and discussion
  • 5.Acoustic characteristics of English vowels
    • 5.1Introduction
    • 5.2Participants
    • 5.3Methodology
    • 5.4Data analysis
    • 5.5English vowels: Results and discussion
  • 6.General discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix
References (36)
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