How are speech sound categories acquired in bilingual first language acquisition?

Abstract

For bilingual infants, phonetic categories of the two languages develop interdependently. This is supported by the differences in time course and trajectory of development of phonetic perception between Spanish-Catalan bilingual and monolingual infants (Bosch and Sebastián-Gallés, 2003a, 2003b, 2005; Sebastián-Gallés and Bosch, in press). Bosch and Sebastián-Gallés argue that for similar phones, at least initially, infants track statistical regularities across the two languages. This results in a temporary inability of bilingual infants to discriminate acoustically similar phonemes. Research on French-English bilingual infants shows a different pattern. There is evidence that French-English bilingual infants may not differ from their monolingual peers in discrimination of phonetic contrasts (Burns et al., 2007; Sundara et al., 2008). In this talk, data will be presented from Spanish-English bilingual infants to evaluate how development of phonetic perception is affected by (a) frequency of phones and (b) the rhythmic (dis)similarity of the two languages to which bilinguals are exposed.