Phonetic inventories of young Arabic-speaking children

Phonetic inventory studies may be undertaken to consider the influence of the ambient language on the sounds produced by young children, to describe the characteristics of the inventories themselves, or to provide support for language universals. This study addresses each of these issues in relation to Arabic, a language that has not been described extensively in recent literature. Spontaneous speech samples were collected from 13 Arabic-speaking children between the ages of 14-24 months. The samples were analysed to determine the consonant inventories of these children in four word positions (SIWI, SIWW, SFWW and SFWF), as well as the frequencies of occurrence and rank order of consonants, consonants that were 'preferred' by some children, and the frequency of occurrence of vowels in the samples. Several characteristics of these inventories closely match those reported for other languages; however, the frequent occurrence of sounds carrying a high functional load in the language strongly suggests that the ambient language is influencing the sounds used even as early as 14 months.