Abstract:

The study of the learning in second and third languages is a subject of current scientific interest, especially at the educational level. Most of studies show the importance of this area in children and they focus on different environments linguistic, but little is known about the relationship between languages learning and phonological oral development. When we are based on theory, if children are exposed to more linguistic sounds, it is supposed that their understanding and their production about different phonological knowledge will be better. In this work the proposal is to analyze the phonology differences that exist between three groups of children exposed to different languages: monolingual (Spanish), bilingual (Spanish and English) and trilingual (Spanish-English and basque). The participants were 272 students who were studying their first course in Primary Education (6 years old). The results were taken through the Phonological Register test with quantitative methodology. In this test, children had to produce the name of 57 tasks in spontaneous expression and repetition.
The results indicate that there are differences between these groups and the bilingual group is better than the other groups in spontaneous expression. In addition, the trilingual group of children benefits more from repetition tasks in phonology area than the other groups. The monolingual group presents lower results than the other groups. Thus, the influence of new languages (not only the mother tongue) seems to be important in the phonological oral development and this learning could improve our phonological knowledge. This leads us to study the need for a systematic learning of different languages that allows increasing the linguistic knowledge of our students.

Keywords:

Phonological Knowledge, language, education.