The Development of More Than One Phonology: A Case Study of a Norwegian-English Bilingual Child

Abstract

There is increasing evidence that bilingual children are able to separate their languages from the earliest stages of language production, but very little of this data comes from phonological acquisition studies. This study investigates the lexical forms and speech sound production of a child learning Norwegian and English bilingually from birth. Data for lexical analysis are words attested by the MacArthur Development Inventory for Infants and diary data when the child was 1;2 to 1;8. Phonological analysis was based on audio recordings of the child at 1;9 in separate Norwegian and English-language contexts. The child's translation equivalents and preference for using each language with the speakers of that language show that he did not treat English and Norwegian as a unified language system. He maintained this distinction in aspects of his sound production, including (1) the size and some distributional characteristics of his phonetic inventory in each language environment, (2) differential accuracy by word position in matching adult phonemes in the two languages, and (3) relative preference for monosyllables and coda consonants in English. His phone inventory differed from those of both English and Norwegian monolingual 2-year-olds. These results are discussed in terms of what it means to have separate phonological systems.