Abstract :
[en] Our research aims at studying phonological and phonetic development in bilingual toddlers exposed to three different language pairs: French-Italian, French-Arabic and French-Mandarin. The objective is to assess the evolution of the children's speech production skills in French, the language common to all our participants, with a cross-linguistic and ecological approach. We speculate that both the language pair and the linguistic dominance could have a specific impact - such as cross-linguistic influences (Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein, 2010) - on the acquisition of (supra-)segmental features and in this study, we focus on vowel production and gradual organisation of the French vocalic system. Our experimental protocol involves different tools in order to longitudinally collect complementary data, during four sessions held at regular four-months intervals, from 18 bilinguals initially aged between 21 and 36 months and exposed to one of the pre-cited language pairs. Self-reported data were gathered via parental questionnaires allowing us to characterise the linguistic profile and assess both lexical-morphosyntactic development and speech intelligibility in both languages for each participant. Concurrently, speech productions in French were collected via a self-developed word-naming task which items were selected on the basis of specific criteria and organised in a particular presentation order, by increasing age of acquisition and gradual phonological complexity. Vowels involved in the collected French words are being subjected to acoustic analyses and more precisely, to analyses of the first two formant frequencies. The evolution of the vocalic system's organisation is being examined through the use of quantification indices, such as the PHI index (Huet & Harmegnies, 2000) which generates a dispersion measure of the formant values in the vocalic space. More specifically, an increasing PHI index would indicate an increasing organisation of the system; i.e., gradual vowel differentiation and categorisation. Results will be discussed considering both each participant's specific language pair and linguistic profile.
