Phonological Skills in Korean-English Bilingual Children: Phonetic Inventory and Segmental Accuracy

Abstract

Purpose: Type of surface-level speech errors can be diagnostically valuable information to identify children with speech sound disorder (SSD). There is a lack of such information for bilingual children, which makes identifying bilingual children with SSD a significant challenge. This article reports on error production in Korean-English bilingual (KEB) children.Methods: Single-word samples were collected from 52 KEB children aged between 3;0 and 7;11. The word productions were analysed for error and compared to the existing date from monolingual English-speaking (ME) and monolingual Korean-speaking (MK) children.Results: While some children's error production was similar to what would be expected in respective monolingual children, other children produced errors that would be considered delay, atypical or even advanced for their monolingual counterparts in both of their languages. No reliable factors could be identified to determine the characteristics associated with delay, atypical or advanced error production compared to monolingual children. Conclusions:There are qualitative differences in phonological development between monolingual and bilingual children. The clinical use of available monolingual normative data is likely to lead to an inaccurate diagnosis of SSD. Small cohort studies in bilingual phonological development should not be taken as normative data in clinical practice due to heterogeneity.

Production Accuracy of English and Korean Consonant and Vowel Categories in 3-year-old Simultaneous Korean-English Bilingual Children in the U.S.

“…Our findings on English accuracy were similar to findings in some previous studies of bilinguals (i.e., Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein, 2010a;Goldstein & Washington, 2001;Holm & Dodd, 1999) in that English accuracy of the Spanish-English or Chinese-Eng- The finding of the current study was also different from one recent KEB study (Kim et al, 2017 Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein, 2010b). In the current study, KEB children produced stops and affricates, in particular lenis, with lower accuracy than MK participants.…”

“…The authors suggested that PCC in KEB children was comparable to monolingual children after six years of age. Kim et al (2017)'s results were similar to Gildersleeve-Neumann and colleagues' findings in that bilingual children's phoneme accuracy was lower than their monolingual counterparts. However, Kim et al's findings should be verified in further studies.…”

“…Kim et al found that the average Percent of Consonant Correct (PCC) of both English and Korean learners in KEB children was lower than monolingual https://doi.org/10.12963/csd.20739 https://www.e-csd.org 671 이중언어 아동의 자음과 모음발화의 정확성 • Sue Ann S. Lee English and Korean children, especially in the younger age groups (3 to 6 years of age). Eighteen percent of the younger age group in Kim et al (2017)'s study was one standard deviation below age matched monolingual English-and Korean-speaking participants.…”

“…Besides SEB children, a few studies examining non-Spanish-English bilinguals, including Korean-English bilingual (KEB) children, have been conducted (e.g., Ha, Johnson, & Kuehn, 2009;Kim, Ballard, & McCann, 2017). Ha et al (2009)'s study examined only 3 children who had learned English as a second language.…”

“…Ha et al (2009)'s study examined only 3 children who had learned English as a second language. A recent study (Kim et al, 2017) included 52 KEB children ages 3;0 to 7;11 who resided in New Zealand. Twelve children in the cohort were between 3;0 and 3;11.…”