The acquisition of allophones among bilingual Spanish–English and French–English 3-year-old children

Abstract

Children are exposed to highly variable input from multiple sources within their speech community. This study examines the acquisition of allophones in Spanish and French by monolingual and bilingual children. We hypothesised that two factors would influence allophone acquisition: (1) the amount of exposure to phonological input, and (2) the degree of variability of the allophonic pattern. Thirty-four typically developing 3-year-old participated in the study. The analyses revealed that regardless of the language, the monolingual children produced similar error rates in the production of the target allophones. In contrast, the bilingual children produced different patterns of acquisition of the allophones: the Spanish–English bilinguals produced higher error rates than the monolinguals, whereas the French–English bilinguals produced lower error rates than the monolinguals. Possibilities for these differences are discussed within the context of structural complexity as well as in light of the effects of between-language interaction on bilingual phonological development.

Keywords:

• Acquisition
• allophones
• bilingualism
• English
• French
• Spanish

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the children and families who participated in this study. We would also like to thank Dr Donna Jackson Maldonado, Dr Rosa Patrícia Bárcenas Acosta, and Professor Martha Beatríz Soto Martínez at the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro for their help with data collection in Mexico.

We express our appreciation to Dr Aquiles Iglesias in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Temple University for funding Spanish data collection. Finally, we acknowledge the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Division of Health Disparities Loan Repayment Program (L60-MD006256) for providing support to Leah Fabiano-Smith during the course of this project, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada for providing support to Andrea A.N. MacLeod for this study.

Declaration of interest

The authors have no interests to disclose, financial or otherwise.

Notes

¹The following is a list of the opportunities and unexpected contexts analysed in the children’s spontaneous speech in French : appétit, araignée, au-dessus, c'est, c'est une, ça, chiffre, confiture, costume, couverture, crocodile, daddy, dedans, des, dinosaure, dire, dit, du, fatigué, fatiguée, Fiona, gentil, gentille, girafe, ici, je, lunette, médicaments, mettre ici, nourriture, ordinateur, parti, partie, peinture, peinturer, perdu, petit, petite, pied, raconte une, ramasser, regarde une, rendu, sortir, squeejee, t'es, tartines, tiennent, tiens, tigre, tirer, toilette, tortue, tout, tu, voiture.

²The term deceleration was originally referred to as delay in Paradis and Genesee (1996), but was modified in Fabiano-Smith and Goldstein (2010b) to indicate that this production behaviour is not associated with disordered development.