The phonological skills of Samoan speaking 4-year-olds

Abstract

To date there has been little research on the typical developmental patterns for children speaking Samoan. The research outlined in this paper serves to fill this gap by reporting on the phonological development of Samoan speaking children growing up in the English dominant language environment of Auckland New Zealand. In this study 20 children aged between 4;0 and 4;11 were assessed using a picture naming task that probed their knowledge of the Samoan phonemic inventory. The findings presented here give an indication of what children in their fifth year have as speech sounds in their phonetic inventory and the types of errors that they may still produce. These results demonstrate the similarities and differences that Samoan phonological development shares with other languages. In particular the differences that seem “atypical” when compared with studies on English are discussed. It is tentatively concluded that these differences may well be typical for Samoan speech acquisition given language specific factors and the bilingual context in which these children are growing up.

Keywords:

• Cross-linguistic
• preschool
• speech acquisition

Notes

1. Pasifika is a term used to identify New Zealand based Pacific peoples.

2. It is to be noted that although the children we are researching are growing up within the bilingual context of New Zealand our emphasis is solely on their phonological skills in Samoan and currently does not involve the assessment of their knowledge of English. We have found that the full immersion preschools we have approached have a philosophical focus on educating the children in Samoan and are reluctant to allow assessment in English. (See also Tagoilelagi-Leota, McNaughton, MacDonald, & Farry, 2004, on the language philosophy in full immersion preschools.)

3. Some of the children when encouraged to produce a word in the picture naming assessment were reluctant to produce the target word while others would produce multiple versions of a single item.

4. It is unclear whether quantitative features of vowels take longer to acquire than the qualitative as there has been little research into languages with phonemic vowel distinction. The research we have seen makes no mention of specific difficulties in acquiring phonemic vowel length (for Maltese see Grech, 2006).

5. Thanks to one of the reviewers who provided this phonetic information on glottal stops in English. My thanks also to B. Dodd for suggesting that transfer from English would be possible for this error pattern, personal communication 18 May 2007.

6. It is not unusual to find a pronunciation from one language to be directly transferred over into another. In a study carried out on Welsh-English bilingual children (Ball, Müller, & Munro 2006) researchers found that the trill /r/ in Welsh was produced as [] as in English by both Welsh dominant and English dominant bilingual children.