| Summary: | To date, there is very little information about the early stages of
bilingual language acquisition, and the information available is largely based
on diary and anecdotal reports. In this thesis research the productions of one
infant A, (1;9) learning English and Norwegian were analysed to provide
information about the phonological system(s) acquired by a bilingual infant.
Two issues where addressed; (1) whether an infant simultaneously acquiring
two languages uses a single phonetic inventory or two separate systems,
and (2) the effect a bilingual environment has on phonological acquisition.
Speech productions were collected via audio recordings during free
play, parental diary records and the MacArthur Communicative Development
Inventory: Infants f1 989). All data were used to analyse the infant's
lexicon. Transcriptions of the recorded data were compared across language
environments and target languages in terms of phonetic inventories, syllabic
inventories and substitution patterns.
At the lexical level, A took the language of the listener into account in
that he used a higher proportion of English words in the English environment
and a higher percentage of Norwegian words in the Norwegian environment.
He did not differentiate phonetic production. A used a single phonetic
inventory in his productions of English and Norwegian words. A crosslanguage
influence was noted in his system, as it contained both English and
Norwegian segments, such as [w], which is part of the English (but not the
Norwegian) system, and [0], which occurs in Norwegian, but not English.
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