Age effects on acquisition of word stress in Spanish–English bilinguals

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Based on studies of syntactic and semantic learning, it has been proposed that certain aspects of second language learning may be more adversely affected by delays in language learning than others. Here, this proposal is extended to the phonological domain in which the acquisition of English word stress patterns by early (AOA <6 years) and late (AOA >14 years) Spanish–English bilinguals is investigated. The knowledge of English word stress was investigated by three behavioral tasks. In a production task, participants produced two syllable nonwords in both noun and verb sentence frames. In a perception task, participants indicated a preference for first or last syllable stress on the nonwords. Real words that were phonologically similar to the test items were also collected from each participant. Regression analyses and ANOVAs were conducted to determine the effect of syllable structure, lexical class, and stress pattern of phonologically similar words on the data from the production and perception tasks. Early bilinguals patterned similarly to the native English participants. Late bilinguals showed little evidence of learning prosodically based stress patterns but did show evidence of application of distributional patterns based on lexical class and analogy in stress assignment. [Research supported by NIH.]