Développement bilingue de la phonologie chez les enfants allophones d’âge préscolaire

In the current environment, bilingual children do not receive the same quality of care as their monolingual peers. For speech sound disorders, bilingual children are underrepresented in the speech-language pathologist’s office (Stow and Dodd 2005). One reason for this problem is a lack of data on bilingual development in linguistically diverse populations (Verdon et al., 2015). In this dissertation, we aim to address this issue by describing the acquisition of consonants by preschoolers in a bilingual context. Indeed, consonant production is a frequently used measure as a diagnostic indicator of developmental speech sound disorders (e.g., Shriberg et al., 1997). This thesis first examines consonantal accuracy in French for a group of allophone children (Chapter 3). The results show that allophone children have a consonantal accuracy similar to their monolingual francophone peers independently of the rate of exposure to French at home. This study also illustrates errors in allophone children that could not be explained due to the lack of assessment in the child’s native language. Thus, the remainder of the thesis assessed both languages of bilingual children from the rapidly growing Algerian community in Quebec. The analysis of the consonant development of Arabic-French bilingual children allowed for the evaluation of the cross-linguistic transfer hypothesis (Chapters 4 and 5). The results of these two studies supported the positive transfer hypothesis by showing higher consonantal accuracy for consonants shared by the two languages. In addition, these results supported the negative transfer hypothesis by showing lower consonantal accuracy for Arabic anf French specific consonanats. There are also examples of bidirectional transfer of specific consonants from one language to the other, but number of examples is limited. Chapter 5 described the consonant development of four Arabic-French bilingual children from 3 years to 4 years 6 months. This longitudinal study allowed us to observe individual differences in development. Finally, Chapter 6 focused on child- internal and child-external factors associated with consonant production in a bilingual context. Results from a cohort of 4-year-old simultaneous Arabic-French bilingual children describe an intralinguistic relationship between receptive and expressive vocabulary and consonantal accuracy, and a cross-linguistic correlation between French expressive vocabulary 8 and Arabic consonantal accuracy. Finally, a significant correlation was noted between exposure to Arabic language and Arabic consonantal accuracy. The data in this thesis demonstrate the complexity of bilingual development of consonant production. They suggest that consonant production varies according to the phonological systems of the languages, the child's language skills, and the child's language environment. Future research on other language combinations is needed to develop a robust model which explains the simultaneous bilingual development of phonology.

Keyphrases: Allophone, Children, Bilingual, Phonology, Arabic, French, Transfer, Factors