Ellen Simon

Child L2 development: A longitudinal case study on Voice Onset Times in word-initial stops

This paper reports the results of a longitudinal case study examining the acquisition of the English voice system by a three-year-old native speaker of Dutch. The study aims to examine whether the child develops two different phonetic systems or uses just one system for both languages, and compares the early L2 acquisition process with L1, simultaneous bilingual and late L2 acquisition. The results reveal that the child successfully acquires the English contrast between short-lag and long-lag stops, but gradually changes the Dutch system, which contrasts prevoiced with short-lag stops, into the direction of the English system.

Acquiring a new second language contrast: an analysis of the English laryngeal system of native speakers of Dutch

This study examines the acquisition of the English laryngeal system by native speakers of (Belgian) Dutch. Both languages have a two-way laryngeal system, but while Dutch contrasts prevoiced with short-lag stops, English has a contrast between short-lag and long-lag stops. The primary aim of the article is to test two hypotheses on the acquisition process based on first language acquisition research: (1) native speakers of a voicing language will succeed in producing short-lag stops in the target aspirating language, since short-lag stops occur early in first language acquisition and can be considered unmarked and since one member of the contrast is formed by short-lag stops in both voicing and aspirating languages, and (2) native speakers of a voicing language will succeed in acquiring long-lag stops in the target language, because aspiration is an acoustically salient realization. The analysis is based on an examination of natural speech data (conversations between dyads of informants), combined with the results of a controlled reading task. Both types of data were gathered in Dutch as well as in EngDutch (i.e. the English speech of native speakers of Dutch). The analysis revealed an interesting pattern: while the first language (L1) Dutch speakers were successful in acquiring long-lag aspirated stops (confirming hypothesis 2), they did not acquire English short-lag stops (rejecting hypothesis 1). Instead of the target short-lag stops, the L1 Dutch speakers produced prevoiced stops and frequently transferred regressive voice assimilation with voiced stops as triggers from Dutch into English. Various explanations for this pattern in terms of acoustic salience, perceptual cues and training will be considered.

Learning words in a third language: Effects of vowel inventory and language proficiency

This study examines the effect of L2 and L3 proficiency on L3 word learning. Native speakers of Spanish with different proficiencies in L2 English and L3 Dutch and a control group of Dutch native speakers participated in a Dutch word-learning task involving minimal and nonminimal word pairs. The minimal word pairs were divided into “minimal-easy” and “minimal-difficult” pairs on the basis of whether or not they are known to pose perceptual problems for L1 Spanish learners. Spanish speakers’ proficiency in Dutch and English was independently established by their scores on general language comprehension tests. All participants were trained and subsequently tested on the mapping between pseudo-words and nonobjects. The results revealed that, first, both native and non-native speakers produced more errors and longer reaction times (RTs) for minimal than for nonminimal word pairs, and secondly, Spanish learners had more errors and longer RTs for minimal-difficult than for minimal-easy pairs. The latter finding suggests that there is a strong continuity between sound perception and L3 word recognition. With respect to proficiency, only the learners proficiency in their L2, namely English, predicted their accuracy on L3 minimal pairs. This shows that learning an L2 with a larger vowel inventory than the L1 is also beneficial for word learning in an L3 with a similarly large vowel inventory.

The Relation between Orthography and Phonology from Different Angles: Insights from Psycholinguistics and Second Language Acquisition:

Between phonological forms and their orthographic representations a close connection can be established. Previous psycholinguistic research has amply illustrated that word recognition can be influenced by orthography (Perre & Ziegler, 2008; Taft, 2001) and that orthography plays a role in phonemic awareness (Cheung, Chen, Lai, Wong, & Hills, 2001; Tyler & Burnham, 2006). However, despite the long-standing acceptance of the importance of orthography in word recognition, little research has been carried out on how orthography may exert any influence on second language acquisition. The interest in orthography has so far mainly come from two fields: the field of psycho-linguistics and that of reading acquisition.In the field of psycholinguistics the focus of previous studies has often lain on the effects of spelling-to-sound inconsistencies and sound-to-spelling inconsistencies on word recognition (Pattamadilok, Morais, Ventura, & Kolinsky, 2007; Ziegler & Ferrand, 1998; Ziegler, Petrova, & Ferrand, 2008). The aim is to get an insight into how exactly graphemes are mapped onto phonemes in the minds of literate people and into the extent to which there is feedback between the lexical and the phonological and orthographical components.The onset of reading has been shown to have an effect on the child’s developing phonological system (Goswami, Ziegler, & Richardson, 2005). First language acquisi-tion studies often aim at examining to what extent learning to read promotes phonemic awareness (or syllabic awareness, in some non-alphabetic languages) or to what extent this awareness assists children in the acquisition of their language’s writing system

Laryngeal systems in Dutch, English and German : a contrastive-phonological study on second and third language acquisition

Although Dutch, English and German all have a phonological contrast between voiced and voiceless plosives, they differ in the way these stops are realized: while English and German contrast voiceless aspirated with phonetically voiceless stops, Dutch has a contrast between voiceless unaspirated and prevoiced stops. This study compares these three laryngeal stop systems and examines the acquisition of the English and German systems by a group of native speakers of Dutch. The analysis reveals that both trained and untrained participants transferred prevoicing from Dutch into English and German, but acquired aspiration and thus showed a ‘mixed’ laryngeal system in both their L2 (English) and their L3 (German). Since even untrained participants produced voiceless stops in the target Voice Onset Time range, pronunciation training has only a moderate effect.

Voicing in Contrast. Acquiring a Second Language Laryngeal System

Voicing in Contrast is a thorough study of typological differences in the laryngeal systems of Dutch and English. Based on a substantial new database of Dutch and English conversational speech by native speakers of different varieties of Dutch, it examines to what extent native speakers of Dutch acquire English obstruent voicing. A sample of the data is available on a CD-ROM accompanying the book.

Enhancing academic reading skills through extensive reading

Abstract The current study explores the feasibility of an extensive reading programme in the context of a low-income country (Mozambique), as well as the influence of extensive reading on academic reading. The programme took over 4 months and was conducted among 30 students majoring in Journalism at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique in 2013. The study applied a reading comprehension pre-test and post-test design, as well as three-minute reading speed pre- and post-tests. Using SPSS statistical analysis, three paired-samples t-tests were administered and the progress from the reading speed pre-test to the post-test was found to be significant. Study results indicate that reading speed and reading comprehension are complementary abilities, since students who achieved higher reading speed also scored higher marks in the academic reading comprehension tests. Moreover, the reading comprehension results showed that extensive general reading transfers to academic reading skills. However, students’ motivation to read did not show a considerable improvement. It can be concluded that an extensive reading programme is indeed feasible and desirable among Mozambican university students, but that there are still problems concerning requirements for the implementation of such extensive reading programmes.

Phonological representations in children's native and non-native lexicon ∗

This study investigated the phonological representations of vowels in childrens native and non-native lexicons. Two experiments were mispronunciation tasks (i.e., a vowel in words was substituted by another vowel from the same language). These were carried out by Dutch-speaking 9-12-year-old children and Dutch-speaking adults, in their native (Experiment 1, Dutch) and non-native (Experiment 2, English) language. A third experiment tested vowel discrimination. In Dutch, both children and adults could accurately detect mispronunciations. In English, adults, and especially children, detected substitutions of native vowels (i.e., vowels that are present in the Dutch inventory) by non-native vowels more easily than changes in the opposite direction. Experiment 3 revealed that children could accurately discriminate most of the vowels. The results indicate that childrens L1 categories strongly influenced their perception of English words. However, the data also reveal a hint of the development of L2 phoneme categories.

Phonological category quality in the mental lexicon of child and adult learners

Aims and objectives: The aim was to identify which criteria children use to decide on the category membership of native and non-native vowels, and to get insight into the organization of phonological representations in the bilingual mind. Methodology: The study consisted of two cross-language mispronunciation detection tasks in which L2 vowels were inserted into L1 words and vice versa. In Experiment 1, 10- to 12-year-old Dutch-speaking children were presented with Dutch words which were either pronounced with the target Dutch vowel or with an English vowel inserted in the Dutch consonantal frame. Experiment 2 was a mirror of the first, with English words which were pronounced “correctly” or which were “mispronounced” with a Dutch vowel. Data and analysis: Analyses focused on extent to which child and adult listeners accepted substitutions of Dutch vowels by English ones, and vice versa. Findings: The results of Experiment 1 revealed that between the age of ten and twelve children have well-established phonological vowel categories in their native language. However, Experiment 2 showed that in their non-native language, children tended to accept mispronounced items which involve sounds from their native language. At the same time, though, they did not fully rely on their native phonemic inventory because the children accepted most of the correctly pronounced English items. Originality: While many studies have examined native and non-native perception by infants and adults, studies on first and second language perception of school-age children are rare. This study adds to the body of literature aimed at expanding our knowledge in this area. Implications: The study has implications for models of the organization of the bilingual mind: while proficient adult non-native listeners generally have clearly separated sets of phonological representations for their two languages, for non-proficient child learners the L1 phonology still exerts a strong influence on the L2 phonology.

Acquiring non-native speech through early media exposure: Belgian children’s productions of english vowels

Abstract This study aims to map native Dutch and non-native English vowels of Belgian children who have not been immersed and have not received instruction in English, but who are exposed to it through the media. It investigates to what extent this type of exposure is sufficient to develop new phonetic vowel categories. Twenty-four children aged 9–12 years performed production tasks focusing on Dutch and English monophthongs. Vowel formants were normalized and statistically analysed, and results highlight the English contrasts /ɛ–æ/, /ʊ–u/ and /ɒ–ɔ/, which are lacking in Dutch. The children produced contrasting /ɛ/ and /æ/ in F1 and F2 in a repetition task, and English /ɛ/ and /æ/ were considerably different from the closest Dutch vowel /ɛ/ in terms of anteriority. The children’s /ʊ–u/ and /ɒ–ɔ/ differed in F1 and F2. The closest Dutch vowel /u/ did not differ from English /u/, and differed from /ʊ/ only in F1. Dutch /ɔ/ differed from /ɒ/ in F1 and F2 and differed from English /ɔ/ in F1. The results suggest that media-induced Second Language Acquisition should not be underestimated, for even in contexts of L2 acquisition exclusively through media exposure, children learn to produce contrasts between L2 vowels which do not exist in their L1.