We are excited to announce that the following manuscript has been accepted for publication:
McLeod, S., Verdon, S., Tran, V. H., Margetson, K., Wang, C., Phạm, B., To, L., & Huynh, K. (2023, in press March). Multilingual speech acquisition by Vietnamese-English-speaking children and adult family members. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research.
The final manuscript is 110 pages long (including supplemental appendices). It has been a huge effort. This is our most comprehensive paper written as part of the 4-year VietSpeech study funded by the prestigious Australian Research Council Discovery Award: https://www.csu.edu.au/research/vietspeech/overview
We believe that this paper will change how SLPs undertake multilingual assessments and analyses across the world – and provides the evidence and process (in Appendix A) for how to do this using theVietSpeech Multilingual Assessment Protocol
Here is the abstract
Purpose: This paper presents a large-scale example of culturally-responsive assessment and analysis of multilingual Vietnamese-English-speaking children and their family members using the VietSpeech Protocol involving: (a) examining all spoken languages, (b) comparing ambient phonology produced by family members, (c) including dialectal variants in the definition of accuracy, and (d) clustering participants with similar language experience.
Method: The VietSpeech sample (N=154) consisted of 69 children (2;0–8;10yrs) and 85 adult family members with Vietnamese heritage living in Australia. Speech was sampled using the Vietnamese Speech Assessment (Vietnamese) and Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology (English).
Results: Children’s Vietnamese consonant accuracy was significantly higher when dialectal variants were accepted (PCC-D M=87.76, SD=8.18), compared to when only Standard Vietnamese was accepted as the correct production (PCC-S M=70.34 SD=8.78), Cohen’s d=3.55 (large effect). Vietnamese voiced plosives, nasals, semivowels, vowels and tones were more often correct than voiceless plosives and fricatives. Children’s Standard Australian English consonant accuracy (PCC-S) was 82.51 (SD=15.57). English plosives, nasals, glides and vowels were more often correct than fricatives and affricates. Vietnamese word-initial consonants had lower accuracy than word-final consonants; whereas, English consonant accuracy was rarely influenced by word position. Consonant accuracy and intelligibility was highest for children with high proficiency in both Vietnamese and English. Children’s consonant productions were most similar to their mothers’, than other adults or siblings’ productions. Adults’ Vietnamese consonants, vowels and tones were more likely to match Vietnamese targets than their children’s productions. Adults’ pronunciation was influenced by dialectal and cross-linguistic factors.
Conclusion: Children’s speech acquisition was influenced by cross-linguistic, dialectal, maturational, language experience, and environmental (ambient phonology) factors. This study highlights the importance of including all spoken languages, adult family members, dialectal variants, and language proficiency to inform differential diagnosis of speech sound disorders and identify clinical markers in multilingual populations.
