Phonetic Features of Adult Non-Native English and their Relationship to English Language Development in Bilingual Children

Vocabulary development in monolingual and bilingual children is impacted by quantity of language input. Although studies addressing quantity of language input in monolingual and bilingual environments has been well supported, the issue of quality of language input in multilingual environments remains virtually unexplored. This study addresses the quality of non-native language input by describing phonetic and prosodic features of non-native English directed at bilingual children. In addition, this work examines the relationship between qualitative factors of non-native English speech input and English expressive vocabulary development in bilingual children. Spontaneous English speech samples were collected from thirteen mother-child dyads while playing with a variety of food and animal toys. Mothers were all native Spanish speakers communicating with their children in English. Non-native English productions of select content words were phonetically transcribed and analyzed for phonetic and lexical stress accuracy. Adult pronunciation accuracy was calculated using four accuracy measures for phonemes, consonants, vowels, and words. Children's raw vocabulary scores from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory: Words and Sentences were used to assess children's language abilities in English. Results of correlation analyses showed that there was a significant and strong correlation between mother pronunciation accuracy and English vocabulary scores at 30 months of age.