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Part of
Multilingual Acquisition and Learning: An ecosystemic view to diversity
Edited by Elena Babatsouli
[Studies in Bilingualism 67] 2024
► pp. 324–345

Chapter 12
Variation in phonological and morphosyntactic development in multilingual pre-schoolers

| Molloy University
| City University of New York Graduate Center
| City University of New York Graduate Center

The present chapter investigates how the quantity of input and the linguistic characteristics of the Heritage Language (HL), Spanish or Russian, impact the comprehension of English Subject-Verb Agreement (SVA) (Study 1) and the production of English vowels (Study 2). In both HLs, SVA exhibits more contrastive forms than in English. Study 1 demonstrates that this HL characteristic facilitates the comprehension of English SVA by bilingual preschoolers, more so than the percentage of exposure to English. In contrast, both HLs exhibit a smaller and phonetically different vowel inventory compared to English. Study 2 demonstrates that the exact vowel inventory of the HL combined with amount of English exposure helped to explain the acoustic characteristics of the productions of bilingual Spanish-English and Russian-English preschoolers. These results have clinical and educational relevance.

Keywords: bilingualism, morphosyntax, preschoolers, lax vowels, subject-verb agreement
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Ecological considerations
  • 3.Phonological and morphosyntactic features under investigation
    • 3.1Subject-verb agreement in English, Spanish and Russian
    • 3.2English, Spanish and Russian vowels
  • 4.Comprehension of subject-verb agreement
    • 4.1Introduction
    • 4.2Participants
    • 4.3Methods and procedure
    • 4.4Results
    • 4.5Spanish-English bilingual results and discussion
    • 4.6Russian-English bilingual results and discussion
  • 5.Acoustic characteristics of English vowels
    • 5.1Introduction
    • 5.2Participants
    • 5.3Methodology
    • 5.4Data analysis
    • 5.5English vowels: Results and discussion
  • 6.General discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 30 May 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.67.12bar
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