Do bilingual two-year-olds have separate phonological systems?

Abstract

The present study was designed to examine whether bilingual two-year-olds have differentiated phonological systems and if so, whether there are crosslinguistic influences between them. Eighteen English-speaking monolingual, 18 Frenchspeaking monolingual and 17 French-English bilingual children (mean age=30 months) participated in a nonsense-word repetition task. The children's syllable omissions/truncations of the four-syllable target words were analyzed for the presence of patterns specific to French and English and for similarities and dissimilarities between the monolinguals and bilinguals in each language. Results indicate that bilingual two-year-olds have separate but nonautonomous phonological systems. Explanations for the form and directionality of crosslinguistic effects are discussed.