English-Malay speech acquisition by children with Indian (Tamil) heritage

ABSTRACT Speech acquisition by Indian children is under-explored. This study investigates English-Malay speech acquisition by forty children (2;06-4; 05) of the third largest ethnic group (Indian) in Malaysia, a multi-ethnic multilingual country. The multilingual model and multilingual phonological test proposed by (Lim, Wells, & Howard, [2015] Rate of multilingual phonological acquisition: Evidence from a cross-sectional study of English-mandarin-malay. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 29(11), 793–811; Lim [2018] Multilingual English-Mandarin-Malay phonological error patterns: The multilingual model and multilingual phonological test proposed in the initial cross-sectional study of 2 to 4 years old Malaysian Chinese children. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 32(10), 889–912.) were used in the present assessment and analysis of child speech data. Two versions of the multilingual phonological test (English and Malay) were administered to the children. The age of phoneme acquisition and phonological patterns were analysed. The children showed comparable phonological milestones with children of other ethnic heritages acquiring the same languages. All singleton consonants were acquired by 4;06. All except one consonant cluster (/dɹ/) were acquired by 4; 06, indicating earlier acquisition than the local Chinese children in the past study. All vowels were acquired by 2; 11 and vowel phonological patterns were rare. There was a decrease with age in the use of consonant phonological patterns. Some consonant phonological patterns were shared by both languages (e.g., fronting), others were used in one language only (e.g., English cluster reduction) implicating the influences of language universalities and ambient language characteristics. Only age and language dominance factors, but not sex factor were found to have influenced the English-Malay speech acquisition. The extra exposure to Tamil by some children (38%) might have accelerated the acquisition of English clusters since Tamil shares clusters with English. The present findings contribute both clinical information to speech-language therapists and theoretical knowledge to the current literature of child phonology.