Resumen de Phonological whole-word measures in bilingual Arabic-English speaking children

Bassil Mashaqba, Khalid Al-Shdifat, Anas I. Al huneety, Mohammad Nour Abu Guba, Hadeel Abdelhadi

• This study investigated phonological whole-word measures in bilingual Arabic-English speakers to explore how the target approximations influence children’s phonological development. To this end, fifteen bilingual Arabic-English speakers and nine monolingual Arabic-speaking children aged 36–48 months (mean = 42) participated in a parent–child conversation. The study calculated four measures: the phonological mean length of utterance (PMLU), the proportion of whole-word proximity (PWP), the proportion of whole-word correctness (PWC), and the percentage consonant accuracy (PCC). The findings revealed significant differences in each measure between bilinguals and monolinguals. It seems that bilinguals’ lower scores resulted from a decreased rate of language exposure, but not because of slow language acquisition and development.