Interaction in Bilingual Phonological Acquisition: Evidence from Phonetic Inventories.

Knowledge of typical phonological development in bilingual children is limited. Bilingual children are often compared to their monolingual peers to determine typical from disordered development; however, it is not known if this comparison is an appropriate one. Although there have been some studies examining accuracy of production in bilinguals (GildersleeveNeumann, Kester, Davis, & Peña, 2008; Goldstein & Washington, 2001; Goldstein, Fabiano, & Washington, 2005; Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein, in press), no studies have examined complexity of phonetic inventories across a bilingual child's two languages, or compared them to those their monolingual peers. For speech-language pathologists to perform best-practice methods of diagnosis and intervention in bilingual populations, knowledge of typical phonetic inventory development in bilinguals is necessary. The goal of the current study is to determine what constitutes typical development of speech sound inventories in bilingual children to better inform methods of best practice with bilingual populations.