Internal and external factors contributing to variability in consonant accuracy of Arabic–French simultaneous bilingual children

Abstract

This study aims to describe the relationships between child-internal and child-external factors and the consonant accuracy of bilingual children. More specifically, the study looks at internal factors: expressive and receptive vocabulary, and external factors: language exposure and language status, of a group of 4-year-old bilingual Arabic–French children. We measured the consonant accuracy of the children by the percentage of correct consonants in a Picture-Naming Task and a Non-Word Repetition Task in each language. The results suggest a significant relationship between vocabulary and consonant accuracy. A cross-language correlation was observed between the expressive vocabulary level of the majority language (French) and the consonant accuracy of the minority language (Arabic). Also, a significant correlation was found between Arabic language exposure and Arabic consonant accuracy. Finally, consonant accuracy was significantly higher in French tasks than in Arabic, despite the individual differences of the children.

Which phonological and lexical factors best influence whether a word is produced and pronounced well?

“…Overall, we documented similar PCCs regardless of sampling methods. This finding is in agreement with several studies that show similar phonological abilities when children are tested via a language sample versus a single-word naming task (Masterson, Bernhardt, & Hofheinz, 2005;Morrison & Shriberg, 1992) and a single-word naming task versus a NWR task (Meziane & MacLeod, 2021). Nevertheless, the measures based on the NWR and the single-word naming task appeared to correlate best with vocabulary size and were the ones that emerged as significant in our statistical models, indicating that these measures tapped phonological processing skills more relevant to vocabulary development than the language sample.…”