child bilingual development of theta

What is it about?

There are issues concerning the bilingual development of a marked consonant in the literature that need to be clarified. While it is known that input frequency has a facilitative effect on monolingual development, its effects on bilingual development are not clear. Here, a child’s dense, longitudinal speech data from age 2;7 to 3;11 are examined in order to study the bilingual development of a marked consonant, theta, in English and Greek. The results address several issues pertaining to monolingual and bilingual development. Theta development in the two languages is parallel: theta word-frequency reflects adult speech; theta vocabulary grows logarithmically; first accurate realizations occur in frequent words independently of their complexity; in contrast, complete acquisition first occurs in words of lower complexity independently of usage frequency; the acquisition level for all words remains at a low plateau level until ages 3;5 and 3;8, followed by a stage of acceleration of the logistic type until complete acquisition, at ages 3;10 and 3;11 for English and Greek, respectively. Because of the presence of two languages, there is a larger and more complex vocabulary across the two languages which facilitates earlier acquisition in the child than in respective monolingual norms.

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Why is it important?

Studies that uninterruptedly trace paths in phonological development on a quantitative (usage-based frequencies) basis (e.g. Babatsouli 2016) are sparse. This article combines both qualitative and qualitative approaches to the analysis of phonological processes as they evolve in the span of time. The focus is on the acquisition of theta /θ/ in child Greek-English bilingualism with a detailed, uninterrupted, and longitudinal account of its simultaneous acquisition by a single child in two typologically different languages. Given that theta is absent in 96% of the world’s languages (Maddieson and Precoda 1950), this language pairing in bilingualism is rare.