Comparing Phonological Processes in Persian-Arabic Bilingual Children and Monolingual Children

Background and Bilingualism is a common phenomenon in many countries which could increase consonant errors in the speech produced by bilingual children. The aim of this study was to evaluate phonological skills such as occurrence proportion, and the frequency and type of phonological processes in Persian-Arabic speaking children in Ahvaz, Iran. A descriptive-analytical cross-sectional study was performed in 28 children aged 36-48 months. The subjects were randomly selected from nurseries in Ahvaz and were divided into two groups (n=14 per group), according to being Persian monolingual or Persian-Arabic bilingual. We used the Persian Phonological Test (PPT), a subtest of Persian Diagnostic Evaluation Articulation and Phonological test which includes 54 one-four phoneme words. The phonological processes were investigated in two groups: structure and substitution processes. Data were analyzed in SPSS applying Mann-Whitney U test. The results showed that occurrence proportion of substitution process was significantly different between the two groups (P=0.05), but the type of phonological processes did not show any significant difference between the two groups. Frequency of phonological processes was found to be higher in bilingual children. In this study bilingualism was found to have no effect on type of phonological processes, but could be effective on frequency of processes. The type of phonological processes in bilingual children is similar to that of monolingual children, so the phonological system in Persian-Arabic bilingual children is similar to that of the monolingual children