Positive and negative transfer in the phonological systems of bilingual speakers

Abstract

The present study examines the phonological skills of bilingual children, taking language use and proficiency into consideration, and compares their skills to monolingual peers. The main research question is whether bilingual children who have parent-reported language use and proficiency measures commensurate with those of their monolingual peers have phonological skills comparable to their monolingual peers. METHOD. Thirty typically developing Spanish- and English-speaking children participated in this study who were matched on age and language use and proficiency (10 monolingual English, mean age: 5;10; 10 monolingual Spanish, mean age: 5;10, and 10 bilingual, mean age: 6;0). The independent variable was language status (bilingual versus monolingual), and the dependent measures included phonological whole-word measures, segmental accuracy measures, and phonological patterns. RESULTS. Bilingual children did not differ from their monolingual peers on any of the Spanish measures, except on accuracy for stops, on which the monolinguals outperformed their bilingual peers. However, bilingual children outperformed their monolingual English-speaking peers on Proximity, PVC, PCC-R, and PCC for nasals. Moreover, bilingual children displayed lower frequencies-of-occurrence on phonological patterns than their English-speaking monolingual peers: weak syllable deletion, spirantization, and fronting. DISCUSSION. The findings of our study indicate that bilingual children may have an advantage over their monolingual peers when it comes to select phonological skills when language use and proficiency are controlled for.