Chapter 13
Wordlikeness and nonword repetition in Spanish-speaking bilingual
children
Some variation in linguistic skill within the
typical bilingual (L1 and L2 learning) population may be attributed
to differences in language exposure (MacDonald & Christiansen, 2002). One
component of language exposure is the frequency of a particular
phonological pattern (e.g., syllabic and subsyllabic word
components) within a language, as well as the regularity of the
pattern, or its similarity to other patterns in the language.
Measures of language processing, such as nonword repetition, provide
a dynamic medium for analyzing the effects of language-specific
patterns on production. Currently available Spanish nonword
repetition tasks are based on Peninsular Spanish (or Castilian),
although most Latinos living in the United States represent Latin
American Spanish-speaking countries. Therefore, a Latin American
Spanish nonword repetition tool that is equivalent to English tasks
would be a beneficial addition to the research literature.
Additionally, Spanish nonword repetition tasks in the literature
vary in the degree to which they manipulate wordlikeness. In this
chapter, we describe the stages involved in developing a task
composed of two-, three-, and four- syllable nonwords which ranged
in their similarity to real Latin American Spanish words. These
nonwords were used to assess repetition performance in a group of
young Spanish-speaking children. Results suggest that wordlikeness
affects Spanish nonword repetition performance in young emerging
bilingual children, providing some support to usage-based accounts
of language learning.
Article outline
-
Introduction and aims
- Bilingual nonword repetition performance and wordlikeness
- Controlling wordlikeness
- Assuming the influence of wordlikeness
- Manipulating language-specific factors related to
wordlikeness
- Steps in the systematic construction of a nonword repetition task
in Spanish
- Access to Latin American Spanish corpora
- Parsing and probabilistic analyses
- Adherence to language-specific patterns
- Age of acquisition of phonemes
- Allophonic variations
- Phonotactic patterns
- Nonword length (length in syllables)
- Recording of the stimuli
- Spanish nonword repetition: The wordlikeness variable
- Spanish nonwords for the repetition task
- Piloting of a Latin American Spanish nonword repetition
task
- Participants
- Inclusionary criteria
- Procedure
- Transcription and scoring
- Data analyses
- Results
- Syllable length and stress effects
- Wordlikeness effect
- Preliminary findings on the effect of wordlikeness on nonword
repetition and future research directions
- Nonword length
- Degree of eordlikeness
-
References