Sound production by Saudi Arabic-English bilingual children and Saudi monolingual children
Abstract
Currently, not much is known about the impact of English learning on Arabic rhotic production
in bilingual children. In fact, to date, only one study has addressed rhotic production in
Lebanese-English bilingual children. Therefore, more research is needed to have a better
understanding of this subject. This study aimed to investigate rhotic production patterns of 10
Saudi Arabic-speaking monolingual children and 12 Saudi Arabic-English bilingual children
between the ages of 6 years and 15 years. The focus was mainly on describing the target like
/r/ and error patterns for each group in order to explore the influence of English on Arabic
rhotic production. This study employed a between-subjects research design, in which audio
recordings of the children’s Arabic rhotic productions in a picture naming task were transcribed
and analysed. The results showed that the differences between the two groups were statistically
significant. Bilinguals showed a smaller number of the target-like /r/ with different error
patterns which reflected the influence of the English language on their Arabic rhotic
production. Finally, the relation between the difficulty of /r/ production in different word
positions was unclear and needed further research.