Phonetics And Phonology In Multilingual Language Development

This Element focuses on phonetic and phonological development in multilinguals and presents a novel methodological approach to it within Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST). We show how phonetic and phonological development is feature-dependent and inter-connected and how learning experience affects the process.

This volume is a collection of 13 chapters, each devoted to a particular issue that is crucial to our understanding of the way learners acquire, learn, and use an L2 sound system. In addition, it spans both theory and application in L2 phonology. The book is divided into three parts, with each section unified by broad thematic content: Part I, “Theoretical Issues and Frameworks in L2 Phonology,” lays the groundwork for examining L2 phonological acquisition. Part II, “Second Language Speech Perception and Production,” examines these two aspects of L2 speech in more detail. Finally, Part III, “Technology, Training, and Curriculum,” bridges the gap between theory and practice. Each chapter examines theoretical frameworks, major research findings (both classic and recent), methodological issues and choices for conducting research in a particular area of L2 phonology, and major implications of the research findings for more general models of language acquisition and/or pedagogy.

This book addresses the topics of language acquisition among monolingual and bilingual populations. It makes use of real classroom strategies along with the use of numerous case studies per chapter, which will be helpful to classroom teachers as well as speech-language pathologists and special education teachers.

This book aims to bridge the gap in investigations into the acquisition of phonology from a multilingual perspective. In order to fully understand this process, the editors present state of the art research into third language (L3) phonology as well as future considerations for this field. The individual contributions address limitations apparent in current literature, in terms of methodology and scope, while offering innovative solutions in the study of conceptualization, design and data analysis, and novel application of theoretical frameworks to L3 phonology. The contributions consist of a number of original studies which attempt to address vital research questions regarding a bilingual advantage for subsequent phonological acquisition, the variables that drive phonological transfer at the onset of third language acquisition, the L3 developmental path, and how L3 phonological acquisition affects existing systems. The empirical and theoretical strides made in the study of L3 phonology, provided in this volume, confirm that it is a promising area of inquiry with a growing potential to provide novel insights into the linguistic and cognitive underpinnings of language acquisition. This book was originally published as a special issue of International Journal of Multilingualism.

This Special Issue includes fifteen original state-of-the-art research articles from leading scholars that examine cross-linguistic influence in bilingual speech. These experimental studies contribute to the growing number of studies on multilingual phonetics and phonology by introducing novel empirical data collection techniques, sophisticated methodologies, and acoustic analyses, while also presenting findings that provide robust theoretical implications to a variety of subfields, such as L2 acquisition, L3 acquisition, laboratory phonology, acoustic phonetics, psycholinguistics, sociophonetics, blingualism, and language contact. These studies in this book further elucidate the nature of phonetic interactions in the context of bilingualism and multilingualism and outline future directions in multilingual phonetics and phonology research.

This volume provides new insights into various issues on prosody in contact situations, contact referring here to the L2 acquisition process as well as to situations where two language systems may co-exist. A wide array of phenomena are dealt with (prosodic description of linguistic systems in contact situations, analysis of prosodic changes, language development processes, etc.), and the results obtained may give an indication of what is more or less stable in phonological and prosodic systems. In addition, the selected papers clearly show how languages may have influenced or may have been influenced by other language varieties (in multilingual situations where different languages are in constant contact with one another, but also in the process of L2 acquisition). Unlike previous volumes on related topics, which focus in general either on L2 acquisition or on the description and analyses of different varieties of a given language, this volume considers both topics in parallel, allowing comparison and discussion of the results, which may shed new light on more far-reaching theoretical questions such as the role of markedness in prosody and the causes of prosodic changes.

This volume brings together a collection of empirical studies on phonological acquisition and disorder of monolingual children speaking different languages (English, German, Putonghua, Cantonese, Maltese, Telugu, Colloquial Egyptian Arabic and Turkish) and bilingual children speaking different language pairs (Spanish-English, Cantonese-English, Mirpuri/Punjabi/Urdu-English, Welsch-English, Arabic-English and Putonghua-Cantonese). The research findings provide much-needed baseline information for clinical assessment and diagnosis as well as valuable evidence concerning theories of language acquisition and the role of the ambient language.

Examination Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject Didactics - English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 1,0, University of Duisburg-Essen (Department of Anglophone Studies), language: English, abstract: This critical essay investigates the acquisition of phonology. It is amazing how rapidly children develop in the first years of their lives. The acquisition of their mother tongue is especially fascinating because it is such a complex process. Not only the linguistic code has to be fully acquired but also all its rules and norms. That is, apart from the language's phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis and semantics, - constituting the code of every language -pragmatic rules are also important for the daily use and the full dominance of a language. This essay focuses on the most basic field, phonology, and explains how a child acquires the target language's phonology. Although the stages of the acquisition process are described generally since they are universal and hold true for all children independently of their mother tongue, the attention is on the English phonology in particular. First language acquisition in general is an important topic, not only for linguists. To have knowledge about it also helps the parents to raise children, especially in bilingual situations. I, myself, consider it very useful to write about such a topic as one can learn to understand what and how many stages and steps are actually involved. If we know how it works, perhaps we may also understand why children initially make errors or quite unusual utterances or even extraordinary sounds (in the pre-language stages) while acquiring the native language. The essay will provide information about the whole acquisition process. However, the main focus will be on the first four to six years.