The acquisition of speech rhythm by bilingual Spanish- and English-speaking four- and five-year-old children

Abstract

This study investigates the acquisition of speech rhythm by bilingual Spanish- and English-speaking children, comparing their performance to that of monolingual age-matched peers in both languages, and to monolingual and bilingual adults. Participants included younger children (between 3 years, 9 months and 4 years, 5 months, 15 days), older children (between 4 years, 6 months, 18 days and 5 years, 2 months), and adults (over 18 years). A sentence elicitation task of 26 sentences per language was used to obtain 64 samples that yielded over 15<th>000 duration measurements of vocalic and intervocalic intervals. The duration measurements were entered into the normalized vocalic and intervocalic pairwise variability index (PVI) measures based on Grabe and Low (2002). The results indicated that younger bilingual children displayed distinct speech rhythm patterns for their target languages and deviated from their monolingual English-speaking peers. Older bilingual children also produced significant separation of speech rhythm, and differences between older bilingual children and their monolingual peers speaking English were also found. Comparisons between younger and older bilingual children indicated an effect for the vocalic PVI measure, but not for the intervocalic PVI, providing partial support for age differences for bilingual children. Bilingual adults showed separation of their languages and performed similarly to their monolingual peers, overall.