Abstract
Aims and objectives:In this study, we consider the acquisition of allophonic contrast and phonetic detail in lateral consonants by second-generation Sylheti-English bilingual children in London, UK.Design/methodology/approach:Acoustic analysis was conducted on productions of /l/ by Sylheti bilingual children, Sylheti monolingual adults and English monolingual children.Data and analysis:Tokens of /l/ were elicited across initial, medial and final word positions from 14 bilingual Sylheti-English children, 10 monolingual English children, and 4 monolingual Sylheti adults. Acoustic measurements of F2–F1 were analysed using Bayesian linear mixed-effects modelling.Findings and conclusions:Our results show that bilingual children produce monolingual-like positional patterns in Sylheti, with very clear laterals in all positions. In contrast, bilinguals produce monolingual-like positional allophony in English, but they differ in phonetic detail, with bilinguals producing much clearer laterals than monolingual children across all positions.Originality:This study is the first to examine the development of allophonic contrast and phonetic detail in both of a bilingual’s languages in a contact scenario. This provides new insights into how contact varieties adopt aspects of structure and detail from each language. We also report valuable data from Sylheti-English bilinguals, who are an understudied community.Significance/limitations:Our study highlights the value of considering structural and detailed aspects of cross-linguistic sound systems, whereby one aspect may show monolingual-like patterns and another aspect may show distinctive patterns. We propose that the results in this study represent the development of a new sound system out of language contact, with second-generation bilingual children producing a hybrid system that combines influences from both heritage and host languages.
Highlights
When a child grows up bilingual, they have to navigate the sound systems of two different languages
We study the acquisition of allophonic contrast and phonetic detail in a bilingual immigrant community in the UK
We focused on whether children’s positional allophony in both languages approximates that of monolinguals, and examined whether bilinguals’ English laterals showed phonetic influence from Sylheti, which we predicted would take the form of very clear laterals
Summary
When a child grows up bilingual, they have to navigate the sound systems of two different languages. There is the possibility that monolingual-like behaviour may be evidenced in one dimension, which could be combined with new and distinctive elements in another dimension. This is pertinent when new accents may be developing out of community bilingualism, where different elements of each language may be combined in order to produce a new system (Cheshire et al, 2011; McCarthy et al, 2013)
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