ASPECTS OF SPEECH DEVELOPMENT AT PRESCHOOLERS IN BILINGUAL COMMUNICATION ENVIRONMENTS
Keywords:
bilingual, mental lexicon, syntagmatic, paradigmatic, lexical acquisitionAbstract
At pre-school age, children experience an unprecedented development on all personality levels, by widening and complicating the relationship with the environment, based on the requirements of activity and communication. Therefore, children face a rapid development of speech and thinking. The development of speech is determined by the evolution of thinking, which at its turn contributes to the assimilation of different aspects of language and vocabulary. In our study, we try to show to which extend a bilingual environment favours the speech enhancement at preschoolers, contributing to the development of several opportunities such as the development of linguistic creativity, of cognitive processes, facilitation of third language enhancement. In this respect, we have carried out a comparative study between the level of speech development at preschoolers in a bilingual and a monolingual environment.References
Bialystok, E. (2001). Bilingualism in development; Language, literacy and cognition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Bialystok, E. (2007). Cognitive effects of bilingualism: How linguistic experience leads to cognitive change. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 10, 210-223.
Bybee, J. (2001). Phonology and language use. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Cobo-Lewis, A., Pearson, B. Z., Eilers, R. E., & Umbel, V. C. (2002a). Effects of bilingualism and bilingual education on oral and written English skills: A multifactor study of standardized test outcomes. In D. K. Oller & R. E. Eilers (Eds.), Language and literacy in bilingual children (pp. 64-97). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Gathercole, V. M. (2002). Monolingual and bilingual acquisition: Learning different treatments of that-trace phenomena in English and Spanish. In K. D. Oller & R. Eilers (Eds.), Language and literacy in bilingual children (pp. 220-254). Clevendon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Gathercole, V.M. (2007). Miami and North Wales, so far and yet so near: A constructivist account of morpho-syntactic development in bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 10, 224-247.
Müller, N. & Hulk, A. (2001). Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual language acquisition: Italian and French as recipient languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4, 1-21.
Paradis, M. (2004). A Neurolinguistic Theory of Bilingualism. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Thordardottir, E., Rothenberg, A., Rivard, M.E., Naves, R. (2006). Bilingual assessment: Can overall proficiency be estimated from separate measurement of two languages? Journal of Multilingual Communication Disorders, 4, 1-21.
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.