Perception in bilingual children learning English as a foreign language.

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of two bilingual children (aged 2y 5m and 3y 6m) learning English. It is based on a six-month-long experiment exploring the subjects’ spontaneous production of English. The aim was to look at the role perception plays in the acquisition of English phonology, assuming that it is especially efficient in very young children, as well as to establish the efficacy of a non-laboratory approach in perception studies. Our experiment has shown that for some phonological features, perception played a crucial part while for others there were intervening factors that made the acquisition imperfect. Transfer was considered as the most probable disturbing factor but could not be verified as such. Results thus prove that 1) young children are indeed very good acquirers of novel phonological features, 2) that our approach is effective but needs to be combined with other types of analyses, and 3) that interfering phenomena, especially transfer and on-going maturation due to the young age of our subjects, are very elusive to test.