The relationship between the phonological complexity of a bilingual child's words and those of the target languages

Abstract

The study of an English-Hungarian two-year-old child was conducted to explore two research issues: (1) the relationship between the complexity of the child's productions and their respective target words in each language, and (2) the similarities of the child's word shapes and consonant inventories in the two languages to address the issue of one versus two phonological systems. The results of the analysis of the complexity of child word forms (as measured by Phonological Mean Length of Utterance, Ingram, 2002) and their targets revealed that the child's English and Hungarian words and their target words were significantly longer for Hungarian than for English. The proximity to the target words in each language, however, was approximately the same (i.e., 68% and 67%, respectively). These results suggest that keeping close to the adult target forms may be as important in phonological acquisition as improving overall complexity in all words. The results of the phonological analyses revealed surface differences, suggestive of separate phonological systems. However, the actual syllable shapes and phonological features found were the same for both languages. These results are interpreted as supporting a model in which the child was building the phonological systems from the same phonological units, but was using them in differentiated ways that produced different-looking surface forms.