Phonological Process in Tamil Speaking Monolingual and Bilingual Children - A Comparative Study

Abstract

The study investigated the phonological processes in groups of monolingual Tamil speaking children (N=50) and bilingual Tamil and English-speaking children (N=50) in the age range of 3-4 years. Data collection was done in schools of the rural and urban areas of Trichy. Speech samples were collected using a picture description task and a general conversation task. These speech samples were analyzed by three Speech Language Pathologists. The results revealed that there were differences in the number of phonological processes occurring among the monolingual and bilingual children and variations in the phonological processes were also seen. The number of phonological processes was more in bilinguals when compared to the monolinguals. The phonological processes like stopping, deaffrication, alveolarization, and depalatalization were exhibited only by bilingual Tamil and English-speaking children and were not found among monolingual Tamil speaking children. Similarly, the phonological processes like fronting, velar assimilation, prevocalic voicing, medial consonant deletion and weak syllable deletion were seen only in monolingual Tamil speaking children and not in the Tamil and English-speaking bilingual children. In addition to these, the phonological processes like backing, gliding, affrication, labialization, cluster reduction, epenthesis, final consonant deletion and initial consonant deletion were common in both.