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The role of phonological structure and experience in bilingual children's nonword repetition performance*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2014

TODD A. GIBSON ,
CONNIE SUMMERS ,
ELIZABETH D. PEÑA ,
LISA M. BEDORE ,
RONALD B. GILLAM  and
THOMAS M. BOHMAN
TODD A. GIBSON*
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin
CONNIE SUMMERS
Affiliation:
University of Texas at El Paso
ELIZABETH D. PEÑA
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin
LISA M. BEDORE
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin
RONALD B. GILLAM
Affiliation:
Utah State University
THOMAS M. BOHMAN
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin
*
Address for correspondence Todd A. Gibson, Louisiana State University, 84 Hatcher Hall, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA[email protected]
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Abstract

The current study examined the influence of phonological structure and language experience on the nonword repetition performance of bilingual children. Twenty-six Spanish-dominant and 26 English-dominant Spanish–English bilingual five-year-old children were matched on current exposure to the dominant language and year of first exposure to English. Participants repeated non-wordlike nonwords in English and Spanish. The Spanish-dominant group performed better than the English-dominant group for both Spanish and English nonwords. In addition, there was a main effect for test language, where Spanish nonwords were produced more accurately than English nonwords overall. The Spanish-dominant group advantage for nonwords is interpreted as emerging from the extra practice the dominant Spanish speakers had producing multisyllabic words.

Keywords

nonword repetitionbilingualismchildrenlanguage development
Type
Research Notes
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , July 2015 , pp. 551 - 560
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

This work was supported by the grant 1 R01 DC007439–01 from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD). Special thanks to the families that participated in the study, as well as to Anita Méndez Pérez and Chad Bingham for their coordination of data collection, the interviewers who collected data, and the school districts that allowed us to collect data for the project. Thanks also for the invaluable suggestions provided by our referees. Dr. Gibson is now at Louisiana State University.

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