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Annotated Bibliography

Decent Essays

Hammer, C. K. et al., (2012). Predicting Spanish–English Bilingual. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 1251-1264.

In this article, the researchers employed usage-based theories in their study in order to examine the language development of bilingual children. The purpose of their study was to investigate the various factors that affect vocabulary and story recall abilities of bilingual children in both of their languages. The researchers targeted the following factors: the children’s exposure to their two language (determined by the length of time that the children lived in the United States), the age at which the children were communicated with regularly in English, the language(s) currently used by mothers, fathers, and teachers …show more content…

The researchers utilized 186 monolingual and bilingual kindergarteners, first graders, and second graders from Taiwan. The author’s hypothesized that the bilingual children (Mandarin & Southern Min) would be likely to learn experimentally manipulated phonotactic patterns more readily than their monolingual peers. The researchers provided the parents with a home language use questionnaire. The authors created two artificial languages with the same phonemes. The two artificial phonological systems consisted of four onsets (/p/, /ph/, /l/, and /n/) and eight rimes. The test phase involved a two-option forced-choice judgment …show more content…

The study demonstrated that bilinguals have an advantage in verbal tasks that require sensitivity to structural features of language. This study extends the scope of Ben-Zeev (1977) and Nation and McLaughlin (1986), which focused on syntactic structure, to the domain of phonological structure. Findings from this study suggest that early bilingual experience may enable children to more readily form an abstract representation of phonological patterns. Thus the researchers’ concluded that bilingual children, regardless of whether they actively used a second language at home or simply had exposure to it, had advantage over their monolingual peers in learning the phonological patterns of the new

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