ABSTRACT

We investigate bilingual children’s perception of assimilations, i.e. phonological rules by which a consonant at a word edge adopts a phonological feature of a neighboring consonant. For instance, English has place assimilation (e.g., green is pronounced with a final [m] in green pen), while French has voicing assimilation (e.g., sac is pronounced with a final [g] in sac vert “green bag”). Previous research has shown that French and English monolingual toddlers compensate for the assimilation rule of their language, correctly recovering the intended words, but not for a rule that does not exist in their language. Using a word recognition videogame with French sentences, we show that French-English bilingual 6-year-olds perform exactly like French monolinguals of the same age: they compensate for voicing but not for place assimilation. Thus, despite their dual language input they have acquired French voicing assimilation and show no interference from English place assimilation.

摘要

我们研究双语儿童对同化的理解，即单词边缘的辅音采用相邻辅音的语音特征的语音规则。例如，英语具有同化功能（例如，绿色笔在绿色笔中发音为绿色，最后一个[m]表示），而法语具有同化语音（例如，在sac vert中的发音为sac，最后一个[g]为发音）“绿色袋子”）。先前的研究表明，法语和英语的英语双语幼儿可以补偿其语言的同化规则，可以正确地恢复预期的单词，但不能补偿其语言中不存在的规则。通过使用带有法语句子的单词识别视频游戏，我们证明了法英双语的6岁儿童的表现与同年龄的法语单语完全相同：他们补偿发声，但不能补偿地方同化。因此，尽管他们输入了两种语言，但他们还是获得了法语语音同化功能，并且没有受到英语同化的干扰。