Bilingual Acquisition and Phonological Interaction: Evidence from the Acquisition of Pronunciation by Yorùbá-English Bilingual Children

Abstract

The typical knowledge of phonological development in bilingual children is limited compared to their monolingual peers; this is due to the interaction between the two linguistic systems in their language faculty. This linguistic interaction accounted for with three hypotheses: deceleration, acceleration and transfer (Paradis and Genesee 1996), is believed to be responsible for their complex phonological outputs. This study examined the acquisition of some YoruÌ€baÌ names and consonant clusters in English with focus on their pronunciation. With two sets of data collected at an interval of five years at different ages from ten YoruÌ€baÌ-English bilingual children, findings revealed that all the subjects had problems with most of the YoruÌ€baÌ names and all the target English words at the first instance. The second set of data revealed conflicting results. While all the subjects pronounced the target YoruÌ€baÌ names correctly, half of them still mispronounced the target English words. This study revealed that since language learning/acquisition is individually conditioned, age and linguistic interaction potentially affect the phonological outputs of bilingual children, especially in the L2