A., acordaron la disolución de la sociedad.—Playas del Coco, once

As should be evident from Chapter 2, trilingual language acquisition has as yet received far less research attention than bilingual language acquisition. Recall that of this much smaller number of studies on trilingualism, the majority are descriptive in nature with a focus on language use patterns and competence. Far fewer studies have a more grammatically-oriented focus, with even fewer studies explicitly addressing the relationship between proficiency and input quantity and/or quality in trilingual development, on grounds of an analysis of linguistic data. A few of those studies that do indeed do this will be discussed in the following section. (Also see the study by Quay, 2001, reported on in Section 2.4.2 in the previous chapter.)

Yang and Hua (2010) report on an investigation into phonological acquisition in a simultaneous trilingual child acquiring Spanish, Mandarin and Taiwanese from birth, on grounds of natural speech data collected between the ages of 1;3 and 2;0. The study set out to test the effect of differing amounts of input and dominance levels (in terms of language preference) as well as the relevance of typological relatedness in the acquisition of each of the languages (Yang & Hua, 2010:107). According to family diary reports, the trilingual learner received, at the time of testing, roughly equal exposure to Spanish and Mandarin, input in each accounting for approximately 40% of the learner’s time, with Taiwanese input accounting for the remaining 20% (Yang & Hua, 2010:112). In terms of production, measured in the number of recorded utterances, Spanish predominated as the language of preference at 54%, followed by Mandarin at 39% and Taiwanese at 7% (Yang & Hua, 2010:113).

On the one hand, the data show that the necessarily decreased amount of exposure the trilingual learner receives to each of the three languages, compared to monolingual learners

68 of each, does not cause a delay in phonological acquisition (Yang & Hua, 2010:122). On the other hand, there is also not necessarily a straightforward correlation between amount of input and rate of phonological acquisition ̶ whilst the learner’s Spanish sound inventory grew fastest, the language in which he received the least input, i.e. Taiwanese, developed faster than Mandarin, in which he received significantly more input (Yang & Hua, 2010:122).

One of the suggestions Yang and Hua (2010:122) offer in accounting for the latter phenomenon is differences in the phonological saliency of Taiwanese compared to Spanish and Mandarin. The latter concept, introduced by Zhu and Dodd (2000) and Zhu (2002), is language-specific and syllable-based: the phonological saliency of a syllable component is determined primarily by its semantic importance, whether or not it is obligatory, and the number of allowed choices within the component (Yang & Hua, 2010:122). The rate at which a syllable component is acquired is said to be determined by its phonological saliency in that a higher frequency equals earlier acquisition (Yang & Hua, 2010:122). According to Yang and Hua (2010:122), Taiwanese consonants have a higher phonological frequency than those of Spanish and Mandarin as there are only 16 consonants in Taiwanese, but 19 in both Spanish and Mandarin. For this reason, they suggest, the learner’s Taiwanese sound inventory developed faster than his Mandarin inventory. The advantage Taiwanese holds over Spanish in terms of saliency is, however, ruled out by the significantly larger amount of input the learner received in Spanish (Yang & Hua, 2010:122). Lastly, in terms of typology, Yang and Hua (2010:123) hypothesise that the typological similarities between Mandarin and Taiwanese “help the child to abstract the phonological saliency of the languages involved more efficiently”. Interestingly, this concept of phonological saliency was also regarded as the reason why isiXhosa monolingual children acquired most consonants earlier than their English monolingual counterparts in a study by Mowrer and Burger (1991).

An earlier study that seems to contradict the findings of Yang and Hua (2010) in a number of respects is Maneva (2004). In her longitudinal study of language acquisition in a young child acquiring four languages, Maneva (2004:119) found a direct positive correlation between amount of input and competence levels (judged, it seems, on grounds of the learner’s preference for the relevant language). This leads her to suggest that balanced input is a prerequisite for achieving high competence levels in all the languages being acquired

69 (Maneva, 2004:119). Also, whereas Yang and Hua (2010) found the same phonemes to be acquired at different stages in the learner’s different languages, Maneva (2004:119) found the acquisition process to follow the same time frame in the case of all the languages due to the acquisition of a given grammatical category in one language rapidly spreading to the other languages.

To my knowledge, the only study other than that by Quay (2001) that explicitly investigates the effect of input quality on trilingual acquisition is that by Oller (2010). This study focused on the effect of direct (i.e. child-directed) versus indirect (i.e. overheard) input on language acquisition in the second year of life of a child growing up with German, English and Spanish. In the extreme nativist view, language acquisition is conceptualised as such a robust process that it is largely insensitive to the manner in which children are spoken to (Oller, 2010:214). Sometimes, child-directed input is even viewed as unnecessary: Pinker (1994:155), for example, claims that there are cultures in which language acquisition proceeds normally, despite the fact that children are not viewed as worthy conversational partners and therefore are not exposed to child-directed speech, but only to overheard speech between adults. Constructivist views, however, regard direct input as an important factor in language acquisition in young children as acquisition is thought to be aided by scaffolding, i.e. the tendency of adult speakers, when addressing a child, to adjust their way of speaking to the child’s level of comprehension (Oller, 2010:214).

Oller (2010) investigated these two divergent viewpoints by measuring both the amount of direct input and the trilingual participant’s productive vocabulary (based on representative sampling) in her second year of life. The participant received considerable direct input in German from her Austrian mother (a native speaker of German with English as L2) and from her father (a competent L2 German speaker with English as L1), less but still significant direct input in Spanish from her Latin American governess (a native speaker of Spanish) and consistent indirect input in English in the form of overheard conversations between her parents (Oller, 2010:215).

70 The light-weight LENA recording device was attached to special clothing that the child wore on the 11 data collection days throughout the year, and used to record all-day interaction in the child’s naturalistic environment (Oller, 2010:216). The LENA analysis software was used to detect periods of linguistic interaction and produce a count of adult words and child vocalizations (Oller, 2010:216). The data on the number of (directed and undirected) words the child heard and the number of words she used in each language were analysed as both a raw count tabulation and as a rebalanced tabulation (Oller, 2010:216). The latter was used to adjust the data in line with the distribution of the caregiving circumstances over the research period, on grounds of parental recollections and written records of the frequency of each interactional context in this specific year (Oller, 2010:216). Both types of tabulation revealed the same results: the directedness of lexical input in each of the three languages was “strongly predictive of both the number of tokens and the number of types of words that the trilingual child used in each” (Oller, 2010:216). Oller (2010:220) views this finding as reason to doubt the extreme nativist view of language acquisition as indirect input, compared to direct input, played “at most a very small role” in lexical acquisition.