Monitoring in children's second language speech

Abstract

The present study investigates the monitoring behaviour of Turkish children speaking Dutch as a second language. Spontaneous speech data were collected over a period of two years at one-year intervals with 74 children from the time they entered Dutch primary schools. In order to discover developmental changes, a typology of monitoring behaviour was given as a function of the children's age. A distinction was made between corrections, restarts and repeats. With regard to corrections, phonological, syntactic and semantic types were distinguished. In order to explain the individual variation in monitoring, the occurrence of monitoring types was correlated with nonverbal cognitive skill and with oral second language proficiency. The structure of monitoring processes was investigated by determining the point in the utterance at which children go back to make a new start for correction, after they have detected an error. The results show that during the process of second language acquisition different types of repairs can be distinguished, some of which increase with age and some of which decrease. A positive relationship was found between monitoring use and the child's cognitive skill and second language proficiency. With regard to the structure of monitoring, it was found that phonological errors tend to be detected faster than syntactic and semantic errors. The results are dicussed in the light of research on first language monitoring use.