Otolaryngology: Open Access
Open Access

Abstract

One of the long-standing theoretical issues in bilingualism is whether bilingual children develop one or two linguistic systems in the learning of their respective languages. The one-system hypothesis suggests that children initially posit linguistic rules common to both languages; then they differentiate the two as they master higher linguistic knowledge. The two-system hypothesis, on the other hand, holds that children in bilingual environments differentiate both systems at an early age and those children are capable of keeping the two linguistic systems separate as these develop. Though the onesystem hypothesis has been challenged on both methodological and empirical grounds, most research on this issue has dealt with the lexical, syntactic and phonological domains but whether bilingual children develop one or two distinct phonetic systems has not been fully explored. My colleague and I have investigated phonetic category formation in Korean-English bilingual children and found that phonetic category of stop consonant changes as durations of exposure of two languages increases. During this presentation, I will present English and Korean vowel data produced by 57 Korean-English bilingual children at 3, 5, 7 and 10 years of age as compared to 60 monolingual English or 60 Korean children. We found developmental patterns and multi-dimensional representation of phonetic categories between vowels and stops. Specifically, 3 and 5 year-olds distinguished vowels but not the stop categories of Korean and English whereas 7 and 10 year-olds distinguished both vowels and stops. Results suggest that the phonetic systems of bilingual children continue to evolve during the developmental process and that bilingual children require different durations of exposure per speech category in order to establish detailed phonetic categories across languages.

Biography

Email: sueann.lee@ttuhsc.edu