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Early and late Spanish–English bilinguals' acquisition of English word stress patterns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2004

SUSAN G. GUION ,
TETSUO HARADA  and
J. J. CLARK
SUSAN G. GUION
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon
TETSUO HARADA
Affiliation:
Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Oregon
J. J. CLARK
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon
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Abstract

Guion, Clark, Harada and Wayland (2003) found that three factors affect English speakers' stress placement on bisyllabic non-words: syllabic structure, lexical class and stress patterns of phonologically similar real words. The current replication and extension included three groups (N = 30): native English speakers, early Spanish–English bilinguals, and late Spanish–English bilinguals. Participants produced and gave perceptual judgments on 40 non-words of varying syllabic structures in noun and verb sentence frames. A regression analysis used the three factors to predict stress placement in production and perception. All three groups showed significant effects from stress patterns of phonologically similar real words and lexical class. The effect of syllabic structure for early bilinguals was slightly different from that of native speakers and late bilinguals showed greatly reduced effects. Late bilinguals exhibited more initial stress overall, possibly due to L1 transfer. These results run counter to the prediction made by Long (1990) about age effects on phonological acquisition.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , December 2004 , pp. 207 - 226
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2004

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Footnotes

This research was supported by a grant (DC05132) from the National Institutes of Health (National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders). We would like to thank four anonymous reviewers and Jonathan Loftin for helpful comments on the manuscript and Carlos Álvarez Gonzáles for providing us a copy of the database of Spanish syllable types.