Dutch speech intelligibility in bilingual Turkish-Dutch children in Flanders

Evelien D’haeseleer,Feyza Altinkamis,Koen Plevoets,Ellen Simon

doi:10.1075/dujal.19025.sim

Abstract

AbstractThis study examines the Dutch intelligibility of a group of monolingual Dutch and bilingual Turkish-Dutch preschool children in Flanders, as rated by native Dutch listeners and measured by a Dutch intelligibility test. The intelligibility of the bilingual children is compared to that of the monolingual Dutch children, in order to examine whether age and/or task effects are similar or different in the two groups. The results revealed that intelligibility was affected by age, but showed no significant interaction between age and group. However, we found a significant interaction between age and task: children’s intelligibility increased with age for a word production as well as a sentence production task, but much more so for the latter than for the former. We discuss the results in relation to the children’s developing phonological systems, the age of exposure to Dutch and the nature of the test.

Highlights

Speech intelligibility has always played a central role in research on children with a speech impairment, since the main goal of treatment in these children is generally to increase their overall speech intelligibility (Baudonck, Buekers, Gillebert, & Van Lierde, 2009)
We focus on the intelligibility of a group of three- to sixyear old Turkish-Dutch bilingual children, which we compare to the intelligibility of a group of monolingual Dutch children in the same age range
The significant increase of intelligibility with age confirms our expectations (Hypothesis 1a); the non-significance of the two-way interaction between age and group shows that this increase does not depend on language group, i.e. we found no evidence for Hypothesis 1b that the increase in intelligibility as a function of age would be larger for the bilingual than for the monolingual children

Summary

Introduction

Speech intelligibility has always played a central role in research on children with a speech impairment, since the main goal of treatment in these children is generally to increase their overall speech intelligibility (Baudonck, Buekers, Gillebert, & Van Lierde, 2009). The notion of intelligibility has been gaining interest in the field of bilingual and second language acquisition. The main aim of this study is to characterize the speech intelligibility of bilingual children, bilingual Turkish-Dutch children in Flanders, in the north of Belgium. Many children grow up with Turkish as their home language and are first massively exposed to Dutch when they start attending daycare or preschool

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Conclusion