Vowel categorization during word recognition in bilingual toddlers

Abstract

Toddlers’ and preschoolers’ knowledge of the phonological forms of words was tested in Spanish-learning, Catalan-learning, and bilingual children. These populations are of particular interest because of differences in the Spanish and Catalan vowel systems: Catalan has two vowels in a phonetic region where Spanish has only one. The proximity of the Spanish vowel to the Catalan ones might pose special learning problems. Children were shown picture pairs; the target picture’s name was spoken correctly, or a vowel in the target word was altered. Altered vowels either contrasted with the usual vowel in Spanish and Catalan, or only in Catalan. Children’s looking to the target picture was used as a measure of word recognition. Monolinguals’ word recognition was hindered by within-language, but not non-native, vowel changes. Surprisingly, bilingual toddlers did not show sensitivity to changes in vowels contrastive only in Catalan. Among preschoolers, Catalan-dominant bilinguals but not Spanish-dominant bilinguals revealed mispronunciation sensitivity for the Catalan-only contrast. These studies reveal monolingual children’s robust knowledge of native-language vowel categories in words, and show that bilingual children whose two languages contain phonetically overlapping vowel categories may not treat those categories as separate in language comprehension.

Impossible to _gnore: Word-Form Inconsistency Slows Preschool Children's Word-Learning

“…Their results suggest that, unless children experience a high proportion of Catalan input, they are indifferent to words mispronounced with the Catalan /e/ -/E/ vowel difference-again, consistent either with merging representations or understanding the representations' equivalence. Ramon-Casas et al (2009), as well as Albareda-Castellot, Pons, and Sebastián-Gallés (2011), suggest that indifference to Catalan vowel changes in word recognition may be driven by the relatively high cognate overlap between Catalan and Spanish. These cognates largely differ in their vowels, which, the argument goes, leads children to attend less to subtle differences in vowel sounds (see RamonCasas & Bosch, 2010, for evidence that Catalan vowels are preserved in noncognate words).…”

“…This implies that those infants either did not distinguish differences between the two variants or understood their Downloaded by [Sarah Creel] at 21:52 07 November 2013 equivalence (interestingly, Sundara, Polka, & Molnar, 2008, show that younger French-English bilingual infants can distinguish sounds between languages). Ramon-Casas et al (2009), in a looking-while-listening paradigm, found that bilingual toddlers' recognition of mispronounced Catalan words was not impaired when the mispronunciation involved a vowel pair only present in Catalan (/e/ vs. /E/). Among preschoolers, only Catalan-dominant (but not Spanish-dominant) bilingual children's word recognition was impaired by such mispronunciations.…”

“…Further, little work connects adult accent-comprehension tasks using overt recognition to infant and toddler studies of accent processing that use looking time measures, which might be considered more implicit. A step toward connecting the infant and adult literatures is to look at effects of accent variability in intermediate age ranges, such as the preschool years (see also Ramon-Casas, Swingley, Sebastián-Gallés, & Bosch, 2009), using both implicit and explicit measures to discern how the different paradigms map onto each other. This is the approach taken in the current study.…”

Bilingual beginnings to learning words

“…In a recent study, Ramon-Casas et al (2009) showed that word recognition is specific to phonetic contrasts that have phonemic status in the native language. When tested on mispronunciations that involve a vowel distinction that is used in Catalan but not in Spanish (/e/ -/E/), Catalan 18-month-olds showed an advantage for the correctly pronounced words over the mispronunciations, while Spanishlearning infants responded identically to both correct and mispronounced versions.…”

Consonantes, vocales y niveles de especificación en las representaciones fonológicas del primer léxico: una revisión

“…The phonological specification of vowels in the initial lexicon has also been explored in children from 12 months onwards, using the same methodological approach (Mani and Plukett, 2007;Mani, Coleman and Plunkett, 2008;Mani and Plukett, 2010;Ramon-Casas, Swingley, Sebastián-Gallés and Bosch, 2009). The findings of these studies suggest that children are sensitive to changes in the quality of the vowels represented in their first words and respond differently when mispronunciations are created via a vowel change that is contrastive in the native language (Ramon-Casas et al, 2009).…”