Seminar Paper - from Helen Doron - Part 4

Does repeated listening to a Foreign Language create two separate phonological systems in monolingual 2-year-olds?

3.2 Stimuli

This present study will use English nonsense words for the repetition task and will create Hebrew nonsense words. Ten 4-syllable words in Hebrew (some of them nonsense and some simply long words that it was presumed the child would not be familiar with) and 12 nonsense words in English (we took the exact same words as used by Paradis, 2001) were used to test the children's sensitivity to word rhythm and syllable weight (Table 1 and 2). Four syllable words were chosen to best ensure that the children would use word truncation and maximize the effects of potential prosodic rhythm constraints.

In the Paradis study (2001), the English nonsense words were created with the help of native English-speakers to make words according to the phonotactics and syllabification constraints of English. In this study, we used these same English words and we created Hebrew words with the linguistic constraints of Hebrew and with the assistance of native Hebrew-speakers. As with the English, there were three components considered in the creation of these stimuli: segmental, syllabic and prosodic.

1. Segmental: within each word, each syllable starts with a unique consonant - vowel pairing, to help the children differentiate between the syllables. Between words, nearly all the syllables have different consonant - vowel pairs. In addition, consonant clusters were not used.
2. Syllabic and prosodic: There are four rhythm types in the English sets, representing the common noun patterns: WS'WS, WSWW, SS'WW, SWS'W. 2 rhythm types were used in the Hebrew sets representing the main noun patterns: WWSW, WWWS. The latter is the most common pattern and template. The English WS'WS is close to the most common Hebrew template pattern and therefore allows for possible interlanguage structural ambiguity.

3.3 Procedure

There were two stages in this. During and after the first stage, the interview procedure was changed.

1. Stage 1: The experimenter met with each child with or without a caretaker in a kindergarten or in a home setting. All conversations were recorded. A native Hebrew-speaking experimenter was used with the Hebrew words and a native English-speaker was used with the English words. The children were shown stuffed toys and laminated pictures of unfamiliar animals or imaginary monsters. Each of these toys or pictures was given one of the nonsense words as an imaginary name. The experimenter would say to a child: “This is Bowdeekulpa. Say hello to Bowdeekulpa. Bowdeekulpa wants you to be his friend and say his name. Can you say Bowdeekulpa?” etc. The children were encouraged to repeat the word more than once. This was done for the first group of Twolinguals and Hebrew monolinguals, in line with the toy and picture procedure used by Paradis (2001).