Investigation of Phonological Processes in 4-5 Year-Old Bilingual Persian-Arabic Speaking Children

During the development of the phonological system, gradually, some of error patterns decrease and speech intelligibility increase. The aim of the present study was to investigate phonological skills, including phonological processes and percentages of correct consonants and phonemes in the bilingual Persian-Arabic speaking children aged 4-5 in Ahvaz. In the current study descriptive-analytical cross-sectional study, 28 children aged 49-60 months were randomly assigned to two groups: Persian monolingual and Persian-Arabic bilingual (14 participants in in each group). All participants were recruited randomly based on inclusion criteria from Ahvaz kindergartens in Iran. The instrument used study was the Persian Phonological Test (PPT), a subtest of Persian Diagnostic Evaluation Articulation and Phonological test. In this test, phonological processes are investigated in two groups: structure and substitution processes. Data was analyzed using SPSS, running Mann-Whitney test. The results showed statistically significant differences between the two groups in proportion to the occurrence of substitution process (p <0/05), but there was no significant difference in the type of phonological processes between the two groups. Also, the results indicated a significant difference between the two groups in the percentages of correct consonants and correct phonemes (p <0/05). The present study showed that bilingualism has no effect on the type of phonological processes, but this can be effective on the frequency of processes. Since frequency of phonological processes was greater in bilingual children, it can be assumed that there are two phonological systems at work in bilingual children.