09 Dec 2003

Olga Gordeeva (Queen Margaret University College)

I present intermediate results of instrumental acoustic analysis of the degree to which young bilinguals separate their language structures in the production of phonological encoding of tense and lax vowels, and the Scottish Vowel Length Rule. I collected longitudinal data for two Russian-Scottish English children, aged 3;4 to 4;8. Russian is spoken in their families, and Scottish English in the community (Edinburgh). The children differ in the amount of input in their languages. The results presented here cover the 1st and 2nd longitudinal moments (age 3;2 to 4;0).

I emphasise the importance of establishing an appropriate control framework for bilingual child speech. I show that (1) some apparent language interaction structures can in fact be explained by speech immaturity, and by language variability in the input (child-directed speech); (2) the dimension of language dominance needs to be involved to explain the opposite direction in which the language interaction takes place in the speech of our two subjects for the same competing cross-linguistic sound structures.

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