title: Rate of multilingual phonological acquisition: Evidence from a cross-sectional study of English-Mandarin-Malay.
abstract: Early child multilingual acquisition is under-explored. Using a cross-sectional study approach, the present research investigates the rate of multilingual phonological acquisition of English-Mandarin-Malay by 64 ethnic Chinese children aged 2;06-4;05 in Malaysia--a multiracial-multilingual country of Asia. The aims of the study are to provide clinical norms for speech development in the multilingual children and to compare multilingual acquisition with monolingual and bilingual acquisition. An innovative multilingual phonological test which adopts well-defined scoring criteria drawing upon local accents of English, Mandarin and Malay is proposed and described in this article. This procedure has been neglected in the few existing Chinese bilingual phonological acquisition studies resulting in peculiar findings. The multilingual children show comparable phonological acquisition milestones to that of monolingual and bilingual peers acquiring the same languages. The implications of the present results are discussed. The present findings contribute to the development of models and theories of child multilingual acquisition.
authors.affiliation: a Speech Sciences Programme, Faculty of Health Sciences, The National University of Malaysia , Kuala Lumpur , Malaysia and.
authors.forename: Hui W
authors.initials: HW
authors.lastname: Lim
authors.affiliation: b Department of Human Communication Sciences , University of Sheffield , Sheffield , UK.
authors.forename: Bill
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Wells
authors.affiliation: b Department of Human Communication Sciences , University of Sheffield , Sheffield , UK.
authors.forename: Sara
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Howard
mesh_terms: D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008296:Malaysia; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D010700:Phonetics
keywords: Malaysian Chinese; multilingual learning context; multilingual phonological assessment