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Speech Production, Perception, and Input of Simultaneous Bilingual Preschoolers PDF hosted at the Radboud Repository of the Radboud University Nijmegen The following full text is a publisher's version. For additional information about this publication click this link. http://hdl.handle.net/2066/184129 Please be advised that this information was generated on 2019-01-10 and may be subject to change. Speech production, perception, and input of simultaneous bilingual preschoolers: Evidence from voice onset time Antje Stoehr ISBN: 978-90-76203-90-4 Cover: Gesa Braun Printing: Ipskamp Printing, Enschede ©2018, Antje Stoehr. All rights reserved. Speech production, perception, and input of simultaneous bilingual preschoolers: Evidence from voice onset time Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen op gezag van de rector magnificus prof. dr. J.H.J.M. van Krieken, volgens besluit van het college van decanen in het openbaar te verdedigen op donderdag 1 maart 2018 om 12:30 uur precies door Antje Stoehr geboren op 25 maart 1987 te Bad Oldesloe (Duitsland) Promotoren Prof. dr. J.P.M. Fikkert Prof. dr. J.G. van Hell (The Pennsylvania State University, Verenigde Staten) Copromotor Dr. A.T. Benders (Macquarie University, Australië) Manuscriptcommissie Prof. dr. J.J.M. Schoonen (voorzitter) Prof. dr. A. De Houwer (Universität Erfurt, Duitsland) Dr. M. Kehoe (Université de Genève, Zwitserland) Prof. dr. W.M. Lowie (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Dr. E. Simon (Universiteit Gent, België) Speech production, perception, and input of simultaneous bilingual preschoolers: Evidence from voice onset time Doctoral Thesis to obtain the degree of doctor from Radboud University Nijmegen on the authority of the Rector Magnificus prof. dr. J.H.J.M. van Krieken, according to the decision of the Council of Deans to be defended in public on Thursday, March 1, 2018 at 12:30 hours by Antje Stoehr Born on March 25, 1987 in Bad Oldesloe (Germany) Supervisors Prof. Dr. J.P.M. Fikkert Prof. Dr. J.G. van Hell (The Pennsylvania State University, USA) Co-supervisor Dr. A.T. Benders (Macquarie University, Australia) Doctoral Thesis Committee Prof. Dr. J.J.M. Schoonen (chair) Prof. Dr. A. De Houwer (Universität Erfurt, Germany) Dr. M. Kehoe (Université de Genève, Switzerland) Prof. Dr. W.M. Lowie (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Dr. E. Simon (Universiteit Gent, Belgium) Table of contents Chapter 1 General introduction 9 Chapter 2 Heritage language exposure impacts voice onset time 27 of Dutch-German bilingual preschoolers Chapter 3 Bilingual preschoolers’ voicing perception supports 81 language-specific voicing systems Chapter 4 Feature generalization in Dutch-German bilingual and 131 monolingual children Chapter 5 Second language attainment and first language 151 attrition: The case of VOT in immersed Dutch- German late bilinguals Chapter 6 Bilingual preschoolers’ speech is associated with non- 197 native maternal language input Chapter 7 General discussion 221 Nederlandse samenvatting 237 Curriculum Vitae 243 Publications 244 Acknowledgements 245 MPI Series in Psycholinguistics 249 Chapter 1 ___________________________________________ 1 General introduction Bilingual first language acquisition is a process in which children acquire two languages from birth (De Houwer, 1990; Meisel, 1989). In this simultaneous bilingual acquisition process, children acquire two native languages in parallel, rather than a first language (L1) and a second language (L2) sequentially. The field of bilingual first language acquisition emerged in the early twentieth century through the seminal work of Ronjat (1913) and Leopold (1939-1949), who reported on the longitudinal language development of a French-German bilingual child and an English-German bilingual child. Ronjat’s son Louis and Leopold’s daughter Hildegard acquired two languages from birth because their parents spoke different native languages. Both children were brought up in a linguistically similar fashion, namely using the one parent-one language strategy, in which each parent consistently speaks only their native language to the child (Ronjat, 1913). Yet, the children’s acquisition processes seemed to differ: Louis acquired French and German fast and with few signs of confusion, while Hildegard passed through a stage in which she seemed to mix English and German. While the study of bilingual first language acquisition was still in its infancy, it revealed remarkable individual differences within the acquisition processes of bilingual children. Language exposure is one factor that can account for differences between the acquisition processes of bilingual children (De Houwer, 2011; Gathercole, Thomas, Roberts, Hughes & Hughes, 2013). In terms of language exposure, two main settings of simultaneous bilingual acquisition must be distinguished: bilingual acquisition in a bilingual sociocultural setting and bilingual acquisition in a monolingual sociocultural setting. In some bilingual environments, such as Barcelona, Brussels, Luxembourg and Montreal, bilingual children are exposed to two languages in their broader social environment as well as possibly in their homes. In such acquisition contexts, bilinguals may develop a relatively balanced type of bilingualism with very high proficiency in both languages. By contrast, a child’s bilingualism can also emerge in a monolingual environment when the parents speak different native languages, as was the case for Hildegard Leopold and Louis Ronjat. When a bilingual child grows up in an environment in which only one language is spoken in the community, the exposure 9 Chapter 1 to the language that is not spoken in the community might only be provided by one parent. In such a scenario, the exposure to both languages will unlikely be equal because the caregivers typically do not spend an equal amount of time with the child, and later on, only one language is spoken at daycare, school, and the broader social environment. When only one language is spoken in the community, bilinguals often have imbalanced exposure to their two languages. This imbalance makes it unlikely for a bilingual child to develop equal proficiency in both languages when raised in a non-bilingual society (De Houwer, 2009). To capture the differences between simultaneous bilinguals raised in a bilingual environment and those simultaneous bilinguals who acquire a minority language in a majority language context, the term heritage speaker has been introduced (Cummins, 2005; Kupisch, 2013; Kupisch & Rothman, 2016; see Montrul, 2016, p. 40, for an overview). In this dissertation, the focus will be on children aged between 3;6 and 6;0 (years; months) who grow up as heritage speakers of German in the Netherlands. Heritage speakers are generally dominant in the language of the environment and their proficiency in the heritage language can vary largely between individuals (Valdés, 2000a, 2000b). While some heritage speakers only understand the heritage language without speaking it (e.g., Au, Knightly, Jun & Oh, 2002), others are relatively balanced bilinguals with similar proficiency in both languages (e.g., Kupisch, Akpinar & Stöhr, 2013; Kupisch, Lein, Barton, Schröder, Stangen & Stoehr, 2014). Hildegard Leopold and Louis Ronjat acquired German as a heritage language in the USA and France, respectively. Differences in their heritage language exposure may have been related to the observed differences between their language acquisition trajectories. Hildegard was exposed to German from her father and only visited Germany twice before she entered school. Louis’ exposure to German came from more sources, including his German mother and the family’s servants from Germany, and Louis also visited his extended German family frequently. In sum, individual differences in acquisition outcomes in the heritage language provide a test case for the effects of the amount of language exposure in simultaneous bilingual acquisition. Decades after the first reports on the language acquisition process of bilingual children, researchers rediscovered the field of bilingual first language acquisition (e.g., Arnberg, 1981; De Houwer, 1990; Genesee, 1989; Meisel, 1989; Volterra & Taeschner, 1978), possibly inspired by the increasing interest in (monolingual) language acquisition research and the discipline of psycholinguistics in general (Lambert, 1981; see Levelt, 2014, for an overview). In contrast to Ronjat’s and Leopold’s diary studies, this more recent line of bilingualism research benefitted 10 General introduction from technological advancements. These allowed for studying bilingual children’s language production using experimental methods and acoustic analyses (see Genesee & Nicoladis, 2005, for an overview of studies). Towards the end of the 1 twentieth century, researchers started to investigate bilingual infants’ speech perception, and this line of research provided first evidence for early language differentiation in perception (Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 1997). Yet, relatively little is known about simultaneous bilingual children’s language acquisition to this day, and there are three primary reasons which complicate drawing generalizable conclusions across existing studies (see Kehoe, 2015, for a review). First, the field is predominantly based on case studies or studies using small heterogeneous samples. Second, many studies lack monolingual control groups for each language the bilinguals speak. These two reasons make it difficult to draw generalizable conclusions of the effect of bilingualism on language development independent from individual differences among children
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