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Prosodic structures and templates in bilingual phonological development*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2015

MARILYN VIHMAN
MARILYN VIHMAN*
Affiliation:
University of York
*
Address for correspondence: Marilyn Vihman, Language and Linguistic Science, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD. [email protected]
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Abstract

Bilingual children have long been held to have ‘separate linguistic systems’ from the start (e.g., Meisel, 2001). This paper challenges that assumption with data from five bilingual children's first 100 words. Whereas the prosodic structures represented by a child's words may or may not be differentiated by language, emergent phonological templates are not, the same patterns being deployed as more complex adult word forms are targeted in each language. Reliance on common (idiosyncratic) phonological templates for the two languages is ascribed to children's experience with their own voice (in production) as well as with others’ speech. Both experimental studies and spontaneous cross-linguistic speech errors in adults and older children are cited to support the view that, for a bilingual, unconscious processing draws on both languages throughout the lifespan, which suggests that the emphasis on ‘separate systems’ (from the start or thereafter) may be misconceived.

Keywords

bilingual childrenexemplar modelitem learningphonological templateprosodic structure
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 69 - 88
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

I thank Virve-Anneli Vihman for permission to use some of her unpublished diary data and Margaret Deuchar for providing supplementary data on her daughter's early words; I am also grateful to both of them as well as to my colleagues Rory DePaolis, Paul Foulkes, Ghada Khattab, Marta Szreder and especially Sophie Wauquier for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Márton Sóskuthy kindly helped with the statistical analysis.

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