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Is bilingual babbling language-specific? Some evidence from a case study of Spanish–English dual acquisition*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2013

JEAN E. ANDRUSKI ,
EUGENIA CASIELLES  and
GEOFF NATHAN
JEAN E. ANDRUSKI
Affiliation:
Wayne State University, USA
EUGENIA CASIELLES*
Affiliation:
Wayne State University, USA
GEOFF NATHAN
Affiliation:
Wayne State University, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Eugenia Casielles, Department of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Wayne State University, 487 Manoogian Hall, 906 W. Warren Ave., Detroit, MI 48202, USAe.casielles@wayne.edu
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Abstract

This paper contributes to current investigations of the nature of babbling in infants raised bilingually by analyzing the babbling of a child raised in a Spanish–English environment. Examination of syllable structure shows the expected preponderance of open syllables in both language contexts while other phenomena point to important differences dependent on language context. While some of the differences relate to general features of the input languages, others coincide with individual features of the parents’ input. These results offer some evidence of distinct babbling according to language context and suggest a possible influence of the type of input.

Keywords

bilingual acquisitionSpanish–English babblinglanguage inputsuprasegmental features
Type
Research Notes
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , July 2014 , pp. 660 - 672
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

We would like to thank Wayne State University's Office of the Vice President for Research for their generous support in the form of a Research Enhancement Program Grant and the Wayne State Humanities Center for funding equipment purchases with a Humanities Center Grant. We are also grateful to Dr. Sahyang Kim and Richard Work for their work on an earlier stage of this project. We also wish to thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Finally, we would like to thank our subject and his parents.

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