When: Friday, June 23, 2023, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PMWhere: Arts Two 2.17
Jasper H. Sim (National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) will be giving a talk entitled Early phonological acquisition in multi-accent Singapore.
Abstract:
Many children acquire the sound systems of their languages in multi-accent environments, yet the phonetic and phonological variability in their input and the effects of input variability on phonological development have rarely been the focus of child acquisition studies. In this talk, I focus on the acquisition of English oral stops, and English and Malay laterals in preschoolers in multicultural Singapore. I first describe how the properties of the input may vary within and between early bilingual caregivers, sometimes in socially meaningful ways. I then show how differential production in the preschoolers reflects the variation in their caregivers’ input, and how their production can be modulated by their language experience with significant others in the wider community. I conclude with some recommendations for researching early phonological acquisition in similarly diverse contexts.