Bilingual phonological development: a case study of Japanese-English bilingual acquisition

Abstract

Despite many decades of modern research on child language acquisition, our understanding of how humans acquire languages is still incomplete and, as such, subject to theoretical debates. Particularly, concerning the process of language acquisition in bilingual children, there are two opposite views within the scientific literature; some scholars support the view that certain properties of one of the two languages of these children may affect the acquisition of the other language, while other scholars do not find any evidence for such phenomenon. In this thesis, we examine how a Japanese-English bilingual child, code-named Naoki, developed consonants and consonant clusters in word-initial syllable onsets, word-final syllable codas as well as word-medial geminates and coda-onset clusters. The results from this longitudinal study suggest that while Naoki displayed high accuracy in his productions of syllable onsets in both Japanese and English, his development of syllable codas in both languages was affected by the Japanese constraints on sound distributions within this position.