DOI: 10.1075/sibil.67.12bar ISSN: 0928-1533

Chapter 12. Variation in phonological and morphosyntactic development in multilingual pre-schoolers

Isabelle Barrière, Valerie Shafer, Suzanne van der Feest

The present chapter investigates how the quantity of input and the linguistic characteristics of the Heritage Language (HL), Spanish or Russian, impact the comprehension of English Subject-Verb Agreement (SVA) (Study 1) and the production of English vowels (Study 2). In both HLs, SVA exhibits more contrastive forms than in English. Study 1 demonstrates that this HL characteristic facilitates the comprehension of English SVA by bilingual preschoolers, more so than the percentage of exposure to English. In contrast, both HLs exhibit a smaller and phonetically different vowel inventory compared to English. Study 2 demonstrates that the exact vowel inventory of the HL combined with amount of English exposure helped to explain the acoustic characteristics of the productions of bilingual Spanish-English and Russian-English preschoolers. These results have clinical and educational relevance.

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