Perception and production of English speech contrasts by bilingual children from Spanish-dominant backgrounds
Year: 1989
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: T he p r e s e n t study exam ined th e re la tio n s h ip betw een sp eech p e rc e p tio n and speech production in bilingual children from Hispanic families and described a hierarchy of difficulty of various English phonemes, as predicted from contrastive analysis between Spanish and English.Responses were recorded from eleven Spanish-dominant Mexican-American children aged 4:11 to 6:10 years.A task designed by Oiler and Eilers (1983) was used to assess speech perception.Children were presented with pairs of real objects and nonsense objects, whose names were minimal pairs with contrasts in word-initial position.Children were expected to show evidence of discriminant responding by looking for a reinforcer under the object named by the experimenter.Speech production was assessed by recording childrens' imitation of sentences containing target words which were modeled by the examiner.The results indicated that there was no significant correlation between speech perception and production, however, this may have been due to the small sample size and various methodological problems.Suggestions for methodological modifications and further research are discussed.In addition, the results suggested an interlanguage phonological system of the phonemes examined.Place of articulation errors were made the least frequently, voicing errors were made more frequently, and frication errors were made the most frequently.Childrens' performance on specific phonemes is discussed.Finally, the results indicated that age is significantly correlated with the production of the specific phonemes (7b, d. g, p, t/), but not with the perception of English contrasts.The discussion also relates the re s u lts to th e o rie s o f second la n g u a g e a cq u isitio n an d it su g g ests re a so n s fo r the individual variation observed.
Source: The Mathematics Enthusiast
Author: Karen M. Gideon
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2505832900