Children's Language

Volume 8

Keith E. Nelson, Zita R‚ger, Zita Reger, Zita R'ger

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780805813678
• eBook ISBN: 9781317728863
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology

Each child is spoken to by genetic heritage and by the rich current set of interactional environments -- familial, local community, and broader cultural voices. Using past structures and paradigms of scholarship, scholars seek to understand what the child achieves in language and how. The tools available for this research are not static but evolve jointly through the sharing of information, and with each "brief moment in time" in efforts to look at children's languages "just as they are."

Containing a wide range of contributions from developmental approaches to phonological ability, the lexicon, the grammar as well as conversation and sign language, this text details the interrelated research and theorizing discussed at a recent Budapest conference. The meeting of the International Association for the Study of Child Languages was particularly rich in the diversity of scholars present, which is highly appropriate because such diversity is integral to an informed study of children's language.

1
Insights into Early Second Language Phonological Acquisition: From Transfer and Developmental Processes to a Nonlinear Principles-and-Parameters View

Conxita Leló
University of Hamburg

Selected data on the acquisition of German by a 3-year-old Spanish-speaking child (Andy) are presented and compared to other data on the acquisition of Spanish by this same child. Because Andy's productions show a dominance of Spanish over German, it is suggested to view the German data as second language phonological acquisition. In a traditional framework, some phenomena related to consonants in Andy's German pronunciation could be interpreted as transfer, whereas other phenomena affecting vowels could be accounted for by means of developmental processes. These results contradict Hecht and Mulford's (1982) hypothesis on L2 phonological acquisition, according to which transfer should have more weight in the acquisition of vowels and developmental processes in the acquisition of consonants. A solution is provided in terms of a principles-and-parameters view of phonological acquisition, assuming a nonlinear view of phonological structure. The parameters relating to the syllable and to the principle spreading phonological features are specially considered. By the time Andy begins acquiring German, the syllabic parameters have already been set according to L1, as shown by data on epenthesis, whereas the principle spreading vocalic features has not been parametrized yet and exposure to German input delays its setting, as shown by frequent cases of vowel harmony in German as well as in Spanish. An explanation for the nonsimultaneous fixation of these two parameters is attempted.

Studies on the phonological acquisition of a second language have tried to neatly demarcate phenomena caused by transfer from those considered to run along the lines of first language phonological acquisition and are thus supposed to arise from so-called developmental processes. Some evidence lends support to transfer from the first into a second language, whereas other evidence points to a long-lasting effect of language acquisition devices, showing parallelisms on the acquisition of Language 1 (L1) and Language 2 (L2). According to the theoretical makeup of the researcher, the accent is put on one or the other of these conditioning factors. Hecht and Mulford (1982) tried to resolve the question by organizing phenomena along a scale, with transfer at one end and developmental processes at the other. According to this organization, vowels are most affected by transfer, liquids less, stops still less, and affricates and fricatives are the least affected. At the other end of the scale, sounds order themselves in the opposed relation, affricates and fricatives are most affected by developmental processes, and vowels should be the least affected. This is considered to be a substantial contribution to the field (see, for instance, Macken & Ferguson, 1987, p. 11), because it coincides with some of our beliefs on phonological acquisition. Accordingly, vowels and prosodic features are acquired before consonants, and among consonants, fricatives and affricates are acquired last. This might explain the influential effect of the vowels of the first language onto the vowels of a second language.

In spite of its appeal, this hypothesis is confronted with some difficulties: For instance, liquids, especially vibrants, often pose problems to L2 acquirers, who solve them through transfer; however, vibrants are among the last sounds to be acquired in L1. Some of the data considered in the present study, based on the acquisition of German by a 3-year-old Spanish-speaking child, also contradict Hecht and Mulford's hypothesis. The solution to this theoretical conflict has to be looked for in (a) a nonlinear model of phonological theory, and in (b) the principles-and-parameters model of language acquisition.

Most proposals made within transfer models or on the persistence of L1 principles in L2 acquisition take a linear view of phonology, with the segment being an essential unit of their descriptions. Even treatments taking the syllable into account usually view it in a linear and nonhierarchical way. In order to satisfactorily describe the data of this study, we are obliged to depart from the segment and take an autosegmental view of phonology, which allows for feature spreading. We also have to introduce a hierarchical notion of the syllable.

The principles-and-parameters model of language acquisition was mainly proposed for the syntax and it has been mostly tested within the syntax. Accordingly, the child has access to general principles of Universal Grammar (UG), some of which leave several options open, the so-called parameters, which are then set along the values of the input language. For a more detailed description of the model and some of its applications to syntactic acquisition, see, among others, Chomsky (1981), Roeper and Williams (1987), and Flynn (1987). There have also been some theoretical proposals on phonological principles and parameters: on underspecification of phonological features (Clements, 1985), on harmony (Lieber, 1987; Piggott, 1988), on the syllable (Kaye, 1989), not to mention other parameters related to suprasegmentals like stress (Halle & Vergnaud, 1987). Surprisingly, these proposals rarely refer to child phonology. Evidence will be presented that shows that some data, which are problematic from the standpoint of transfer or developmental processes, can be understood from this new light.

Data Collection

The data for this study were collected to investigate the acquisition of the German phonology by a Spanish-speaking child (Andy). They were collected longitudinally, during a period of almost 11 months. Andy was 2;11,0 at the beginning of the study and 3;9,18 at the end. He was born in San José (Costa Rica), where he lived until he moved with his family to Hamburg (Germany) when he was 1;4,26. Both parents are native speakers of the Costa Rican variety of Spanish. After his arrival in Hamburg, he spent most of the time with his mother; they were often visited by Spanish-speaking relatives, so his exposure to German was very limited. At 1;11,0 he was sent to a day-care center for 3 hours a day (from 9 a.m. to noon) until he left the country after the last recording session. The center was a German public institution of the city-state of Hamburg, with German-speaking personnel and a majority of children from German-speaking families. Andy's group, which had 20 children, was supervised by two young native German women. The majority of children in Andy's group belonged to native German families; about a third of them were foreigners, mostly Iranians, and one North American. The rest of the time he spent at home, where he was further exposed to Spanish. On weekends he often went with one of his parents to a playground where he spent some time playing with German-speaking children.

Eight sound recordings, with an average length of 35 min each, were made at home while playing and interacting with the child. The interviewer, a fluent bilingual native speaker of both German and Spanish in its Costa Rican variety, was alone in interacting with Andy. The eight sessions document the child's phonological development at the ages of 2;11 (Sessions 1,2, and 3), 3;2 (Sessions 4 and 5), 3;4 (Sessions 6 and 7), and 3;9 (Session 8). His Spanish phonology was still developing and data on Spanish was also recorded. Each session was divided into a Spanish and a German portion, except for Session 6, which was exclusively Spanish, and Session 7, which was exclusively German. The total recording time was 280 min, with 137 min corresponding to German and 143 min to Spanish. The resulting corpus was 926 German and 907 Spanish utterances.

Status of the Two Languages: Second Language Acquisition or Simultaneous Bilingualism?

As indicated earlier, the subject of this study is very young—1;4 when first exposed to German, and 1;11 as exposure became more intense through attendance at a day-care center. This poses the question of whether his acquisition of German has to be classified as second language acquisition or whether both languages, German and Spanish, are being acquired as two first languages in a bilingual fashion. Traditional answers to this question (McLaughlin's, 1978, for instance) are rather arbitrary. The question cannot be decided a priori just by looking at the concrete objective situation alone because this is not interpretable in a nonambiguous way. The time span up to the first exposure to German is considerable, compared with his exposure to Spanish from the beginning, but still does not even reach 2 years. The answer has to take into consideration the analytical results as well.

Considering Andy already had active knowledge of Spanish when he came to Germany, if there appear phenomena in his acquisition of German that can only be explained by transfer from Spanish, it should be concluded that Spanish is L1 and German is L2. But considering Andy was so young when he moved to Germany, if there are phenomena in his acquisition of Spanish that have to be explained by the influence of German, this would point to transfer from German into Spanish, in which case it might be concluded that German is L1, but it would be difficult to conclude whether Spanish is L1 or L2. Actually, such a situation would also be compatible with reported cases of bilingual acquisition, with predominance of the ambiental nonfamily language over the language of the family. A third possibility would consist in having both, that is, influence from Spanish into German and influence from German into Spanish. In such a case, more important than deciding on the issue of early L2 acquisition or simultaneous bilingualism, is determining which phenomena tend to penetrate each language—that is, which phenomena tend to be transferred from Spanish into German and which phenomena of German tend to influence Spanish. Are such phenomena characterizable in some way? Related to this is the classical question of developmental processes: Supposing that the acquisition of each language is being influenced by the other one, which phenomena are explainable by transfer and which are explainable by developmental processes? In other words, what phenomena are mostly amenable to such influence, and in what sense can developmental processes be said to inhibit or to support this influence?

By analyzing the data from the perspective of a nonlinear model of principles and parameters, new insights into the whole issue of L2 versus L1 and of transfer versus developmental processes are obtained.

Data on the Acquisition of Spanish

Vowels

Spanish, in its standard as well as in its Costa Rican variety, has a five-vowel system, with three degrees of opening and two tongue positions, back and nonback. Back vowels are redundantly round. In the first and second session, Andy showed a tendency to produce the nonback middle vowel [e] as central low [...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Insights Into Early Second Language Phonological Acquisition: From Transfer and Developmental Processes to a Nonlinear Principles-and-Parameters View
• 2 On Bilingual Socialization
• 3 Development of Turntakings as a Sensorimotor Process in the First 3 Months: A Sequential Analysis
• 4 Young Children's Play Dialogues With Mothers and Peers
• 5 Expression of Communicative Intents in the Single-Word Period and the Vocabulary Spurt
• 6 Object Parts and the Acquisition of the Meaning of Names
• 7 Phonological Awareness and the Alphabetic System: From Kindergarten to First Grade
• 8 Joint Picture Book Reading in Signs: An Interaction Process Between Parent and Deaf Child
• 9 Reading Development in Prelingually Deaf Children
• 10 Functions of Resultative Coordinate Constructions in Early Language and Logical Development: Insights From Children's Acquisition of Polish
• 11 The Relative Difficulty of Children's Comprehension of Relative Clauses: A Procedural Account
• 12 Language Acquisition and Language Recovery in Developmental Dysphasia and Acquired Childhood Aphasia
• Author Index
• Subject Index