The phonological development of a trilingual child: Facts and factors

Abstract

This article investigates the early phonological development of a trilingual child who is acquiring Spanish, Mandarin and Taiwanese simultaneously. By examining the natural speech data recorded between the age of 1;3 and 2;0, the article reports the age of emergence and stabilization of the vowels and consonants, speech accuracy and phonological error patterns in each language. The data show that by the age of two the child is able to produce most of the vowels in the three languages. However, there are cross-linguistic differences in the rate of acquisition of consonants and speech accuracy: the child's Spanish consonant inventory develops faster than the other two languages, while the child has statistically significantly higher speech accuracy in Taiwanese than in Spanish, which is in turn higher than that in Mandarin. There is also evidence of interaction or interference between the languages, e.g. the existence of unusual error patterns. These facts are interpreted in the context of phonological saliency of the three phonological systems and language input.

Current Issues in Multilingual First Language Acquisition

“…The question of how this comparatively limited input affects trilingual children's language development—as investigated for bilinguals when compared to monolinguals—has also been addressed in the recent literature on early trilingual acquisition. Given that the relative amount of input was not directly reflected in the relative rate of acquisition in the three languages acquired by the child in their study, Yang and Zhu (2010) noted that the relationship between amount of input and rate of acquisition is clearly not a direct one. Furthermore, given that the child's development was very much like that of monolingual children with respect to age of acquisition, rate of acquisition, and error patterns, Yang and Zhu stressed that the inevitable reduction in input for trilingual children does necessarily lead to slower acquisition.…”

“…Montanari (2011) suggested that this may have been due to heightened sensitivity to language and its properties as a result of early multilingual exposure. In a study on the phonological development of a trilingual Spanish-Mandarin-Taiwanese child, Yang and Zhu (2010) also observed early differentiation as evidenced by different rates of acquisition in the three languages, sometimes for the same phoneme.…”

Asymmetries in phonological development: the case of word-final cluster acquisition in Welsh–English bilingual children

“…Many other studies on bilingual phonological development have reported instances of interference (e.g. Fabiano & Goldstein, 2005; Yang & Hua, 2010). The overall incidence of interference in these studies is low, however.…”

The Reading and Writing Connections in Developing Overall L2 Literacy: A Case Study

“…As such, children's ability to convey ideas through the printed word is highly emphasized as their success as literacy learners is contingent on their ability to read and write. As early as preschool, young children are building their repertoire of print knowledge and are using emergent writing in the form of drawing, scribbles, letter strings and invented spelling that reflect phonetic principles as part of their transition to conventional forms (Sulzby 1992;Al-Momani et al 2010;Arikan and Taraf 2010;Wedin 2010;Yang and Hua 2010;Al-Mansour and Al-Shorman 2011;Doyle 2013;Lucas et al 2020). In this study, the emergent literacy theoretical constructs are important considering that the participant children had had no previous contact with the foreign language, and as such, the constructs to bear in mind needed to consider how literacy develops both in the native and in the foreign language.…”