Accent and speech sounds in bilingual children

Abstract

Between September and December 2023, Babylonia collected questions from parents regarding their children's language development. This article aims to answer the following questions about foreign accent in children and speech sound errors.

Hello, I'm French and I live in the United States. My 8-year-old son speaks French and English. Since he was very little, he has spoken French with a slight American accent. This has always surprised me, because he's not surrounded by French-speaking Americans. I thought the accent was something you picked up "by ear "*! Is it actually linked to the physiognomy of the mouth?

*For example, one year he had a Romanian teacher at school. And for the first few days, he'd come home speaking French with a Romanian accent! [this is the English version of a question originally asked in French]

How can I address speech sound errors or articulation difficulties?

[summary generated by Claude-3-Haiku-200k - we refer the reader to the article in English in PDF format for a complete answer]

This article addresses two main questions concerning bilingual children: foreign accent and speech sound errors.
Regarding foreign accent, the author explains that this phenomenon can have two origins in bilingual children. First, children may develop an accent due to the input from their parents, who speak the language with an accent themselves. Second, the accent may result from interlinguistic interactions, where phonetic characteristics of one language influence the production of another language. For example, a bilingual French-English child might produce the French /r/ as an English /r/.
As for speech sound errors, the author clarifies that all young children, whether monolingual or bilingual, make such errors during normal language development, especially between the ages of 2 and 3. These phonological simplifications do not necessarily indicate a disorder. However, some children continue to present errors beyond this age, which may lead to a diagnosis of a speech sound disorder.
In the case of bilingual children, these errors may be related to interlinguistic interactions rather than a true disorder. The speech therapist must then conduct a contrastive analysis to distinguish what pertains to bilingualism from what indicates a disorder.
In conclusion, bilingual or monolingual children who exhibit numerous speech sound errors should be evaluated by a speech therapist to determine whether their difficulties are developmental, related to bilingualism, or indicative of a disorder that requires specific intervention.