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English or Spanish Science Language Articles.
Objective age of acquisition norms for a set of 328 words in Spanish. Age of acquisition is one of the most important variables in picture naming. For this reason, a large number of findings concerning age-of-acquisition data have been published in recent years in a number of different languages. In this article, objective age-of-acquisition data in Spanish for 328 pictures were collected from a pool of 760 children, half of whom were boys and the other half girls. A total of 246 pictures were selected from the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) set, and 82 were new pictures. Like the results of other studies, we found that objective age of acquisition correlates less than rated age of acquisition with familiarity and frequency, which indicates that the objective measure is less contaminated by other variables than are rated estimates. A very high correlation was obtained between the norms from this study and those published in English, French, Icelandic, and Italian. These norms will be very useful to Spanish psycholinguists and clinicians. ap
Language integration in bilingual sentence production. To what extent are processes used in sentence production integrated between the different languages of a bilingual and to what extent are they kept separate? We consider three models that differ in their assumptions about the degree of integration: De Bot's [De Bot, K. (1992). A bilingual production model: Levelt's Speaking model adapted. Applied Linguistics, 13, 1-24] bilingual blueprint of the speaker, Ullman's [Ullman, M. T. (2001). The neural basis of lexicon and grammar in first and second language: The declarative/procedural model. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4, 105-122] declarative/procedural model of bilingualism, and Hartsuiker et al.'s [Hartsuiker, R. J., Pickering, M. J., & Veltkamp, E. (2004). Is syntax separate or shared between languages? Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Spanish/English bilinguals. Psychological Science, 15, 409-414] integrated model. A review of the evidence from bilingual sentence production studies shows that Hartsuiker et al.'s predictions are supported, but argues against the other two models. We discuss some repercussions for bilingual language use. ap.
The acquisition of speech rhythm by bilingual spanish- and english-speaking 4- and 5-year-old children. PURPOSE: In this study, the authors investigated speech rhythm acquisition by bilingual Spanish-English-speaking children, comparing their performance with functionally monolingual peers in both languages and to monolingual and bilingual adults. METHOD: Participants included younger children (3;9 [years;months] to 4;5.15[years;months.days]), older children (4;6.18 to 5;2), and adults (over 18 years). Twenty-six sentences were elicited and analyzed using the normalized vocalic and intervocalic Pairwise Variability Indices (PVIs) that express the level of variability in successive duration measurements, on the basis of E. Grabe and E. L. Low (2002). RESULTS: Younger bilingual children displayed distinct speech rhythm patterns for their target languages, and they deviated from their monolingual English-speaking peers. Older bilingual children also separated speech rhythm by language, and differences between older bilingual children and their monolingual peers speaking English were also found. Younger and older bilingual children differed on the vocalic PVI, but not the intervocalic PVI, providing partial support for age differences. Bilingual adults showed separation of their languages and performed similarly to their monolingual peers. CONCLUSION: Bilingual children show distinct speech rhythm patterns for their target languages but with some early equal timing bias that diminishes over time, on the basis of the vocalic measurements. Overall, the vocalic PVI is more robust than the intervocalic PVI, but further research is necessary. |
