1 research outputs found
Early phonological acquisition by Kuwaiti Arabic children
PhD ThesisThis is the first exploration of typical phonological development in the speech of
children acquiring Kuwaiti-Arabic (KA) before the age of 4;0. In many of the
word’s languages, salient aspects of the ambient language have been shown to
influence the child’s initial progress in language acquisition (Vihman, 1996,
2014); however, studies of phonological development of Arabic lack adequate
information on the extent of the influence of factors such as frequency of
occurrence of certain features and their phonological salience on the early
stages of speech acquisition. A cross-sectional study design was adapted in
this thesis to explore the speech of 70 typically developing children. The
children were sampled from the Arabic-speaking Kuwaiti population; the
children were aged 1;4 and 3;7 and gender-balanced. Spontaneous speech
samples were obtained from audio and video recordings of the children while
interacting with their parent for 30-minutes. The production accuracy of KA
consonants was examined to explore the influence of type and token
frequencies on order of consonant acquisition and the development of error
patterns. The sonority index was also used to predict the order of consonant
acquisition cross-linguistically. The findings were then compared with those of
other dialects of Arabic to identify within-language variability and with studies on
English to address cross-linguistic differences between Arabic and English early
phonological development.
The results are partially consistent with accounts that argue for a significant role
of input frequency in determining rate and order of consonant acquisition within
a language. The development of KA error patterns also shows relative
sensitivity to consonant frequency. The sonority index does not always help in
the prediction of all Arabic consonants, and the developmental error patterns
and early word structures in Arabic and English are significantly distinct. The
outcomes of this study provide essential knowledge about typical Arabic
phonological development and the first step towards building a standardised
phonological test for Arabic speaking children