The development of rhotics: a comparison of monolingual and bilingual children

Abstract

This study examines the acquisition of /r/ in German and Spanish monolingual and bilingual children. German and Spanish are characterized by different /r/s. German has a uvular approximant whereas Spanish has an alveolar tap and trill. Words containing /r/ were extracted from longitudinal recordings of the children, aged 1;9 to 3;6. Results indicate that monolingual German children acquired uvular /r/ earlier than monolingual Spanish children acquired the tap and trill. The bilingual children acquired uvular /r/ similarly to the monolingual children or, in the case of /r/ clusters, they were mildly delayed. They were advanced in the acquisition of alveolar tap and they produced more /r/-like errors for the trill. Transfer patterns were observed in one child but they could not be explained by markedness or language dominance. Findings are consistent with cross-linguistic interaction in the acquisition of /r/, in which the phonological systems of the bilinguals approximate each other.

Error Patterns of Dorsal Rhotics: Evidence from Hebrew-Speaking Children

“…Rhotic deletion was also described in Rauch's [22] longitudinal study on a German-speaking child between the ages of 1; 8 and 1; 9 years. These data were supported in a recent study on rhotic development in onset position in German-speaking children [19]. The results of that study revealed that the main errors of /ʁ/ onsets were deletion or substitution by glottal stops (e.g.…”

“…While in English the most common phonological process of approximant rhotics is gliding [14,15], in languages that have alveolar-trill rhotics, such as Arabic, Spanish, and Turkish, a lateralization process is most common [6,16,17]. However, in languages in which rhotics occur as taps or flaps, as in Spanish and Japanese, children tend to delete them or substitute them with the alveolar stop [d] or the [ð] [18][19][20]. When examining the influence of prosodic effects on the error patterns of rhotics, our findings demonstrated a positional effect.…”

“…Children who acquire languages in which the rhotics are alveolar trills (e.g., Arabic, Spanish, and Turkish) tend to substitute them with the alveolar lateral [l], referred to as the lateralization process [6,16,17]. However, in languages in which rhotics occur as taps or flaps, as in Spanish and Japanese, children tend to delete them or substitute them with the alveolar stop [d] or the [ð] [18][19][20].…”

Bridging ears and eyes when learning spoken words: On the effects of bilingual experience at 30 months

“…This possibility is supported by evidence showing that bilingual infants and adults have a greater capacity to retain information and update memory content as compared to monolinguals (Brito et al, 2015;Singh et al, 2015). Yet, such memory advantage has not been consistently found (Paap, Johnson, & Sawi, 2015) This possibility is supported by auditory word comprehension and production studies that suggest that bilinguals are more accurate in perceiving (Singh et al, 2018) and producing the phonological details of words (Kehoe, 2018). However, some other evidence describes considerable variability in how they appreciate the finegrained phonological details of words, with capacities that are sometimes comparable or inferior to those of monolinguals (perception: Fennell & Byers-Heinlein, 2014;Havy et al, 2016;Wewalaarachchi et al, 2017;production: MACLeod, Laukys, & Rvachew, 2011).…”

Towards modelling heritage speakers' sound systems

“…It is true that HSs are often perceived as sounding more native-like than late L2ers, but they also outperform L2ers on other aspects of language. The idea that HSs’ sound systems are relatively robust is compromised by widely-reported instances of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in child bilinguals (e.g., Kehoe, 2018, Lleó, 2018) and the fact that many HSs end up sounding foreign in their native, heritage language (HL). Polinsky and Scontras refer to a “heritage accent” (p. 10); other studies show that HSs are (mis)identified as L1-speakers of their dominant language (DL) (e.g., Kupisch, Barton, Hailer, Lein, Stangen & van de Weijer, 2014; Lloyd-Smith, Einfeldt & Kupisch, 2019).…”