explore the role of language dominance in the production of onset clusters
(an aspect of phonological development that has largely escaped detailed
attention to date) in the two languages of a large group of Welsh-English
bilingual children, aged 2;6 to 6;0. Using a series of word elicitation tasks, the
data revealed that bilingual children exhibited a considerably faster rate of
acquisition of consonant clusters than their monolingual peers. A further
outcome of the analysis was that home language dominance played an
important role in cluster acquisition, but that this influence was asymmetri-
cal: Welsh-English bilingual children performed better than English-
dominant children on Welsh clusters, but evidence for the reverse pattern
was not found, demonstrating that the early relations between a bilingual’s
two languages, at least in the phonetic domain, can be facilitative, under the
right conditions of dominance.
Chapter 2 goes on to explore the relationship between bilinguals’ two
sound systems from a different angle. Rather than investigating the effect of
the first language (L1) on the second language (L2), as is common in studies of
transfer, this chapter examines whether it is possible for late consecutive bilin-
gual speakers to perform deviantly from native speaker norms in their L1. This
phenomenon is often referred to as L1 attrition, and this chapter examines
whether it is evident in the phonetic domain. This is done through a thorough
review of the literature, including some as yet unpublished research by the
author herself and her collaborators. Not only does she examine whether L
attrition is evident in the phonetic domain of late consecutive bilingual speak-
ers through instrumental phonetic analyses, she also examines the extent to
which it is perceived as non-native by native listeners. Her findings clearly
point to the existence of L1 attrition in the phonetic domain, but more research
is needed to determine whether such deviances are perceived as non-native or
foreign-accented by monolingual speakers of the L1. The author discusses pos-
sible explanations of these findings, such as the existence of biologically deter-
mined maturational constraints and the bilingual cognitive load theory. This
chapter provides new evidence to support the notion that the relationship
between bilinguals’ two sound systems is bi- and not uni-directional.
The second part – Bilingual Language Development – goes on to
explore the factors that contribute to the acquisition, production and pro-
cessing of linguistic and non-linguistic structures in bilingual speakers. In
Chapter 3 we begin by exploring the potential transfer of grammatical struc-
tures from one language to the other. In exploring this issue, we discuss the
potential transfer of gender and word order in the emergent grammars of
two children acquiring an interesting and relatively rare pair of languages –
German and Welsh – simultaneously from birth. Using established, longitu-
dinal, data-collection methods to collect naturalistic speech samples in both
languages, the role of structural complexity and frequency of form on chil-
dren’s productions of gender and word order in both languages are explored.
Results identify slower rates of acquisition among the bilinguals (as opposed
Introduction xix