Phonological development in 3-5 years old Bahdini Kurdish-speaking children

Abstract

Studying phonological development is crucial for understanding linguistic patterns, supporting language perservation, educational development and clinical practice. There is lack of sufficient research about phonological development in the Kurdish language. The aim of this study is to examine the phonological development in typically developing Bahdini Kurdish (BK)-speaking children. The analysis uses the quantitative phonological development metrics that assess the correctness of a single segment such as Percentage of Consonant Correct (PCC), Percentage of Vowel Correct (PVC) and Percentage of Phoneme Correct (PPC) and those that evaluate the whole words abilities instead of mere segments such as Phonological Mean Length of Utterance (PMLU), Proportion of Whole-Word Proximity (PWP) and Proportion of Whole-Word Correctness (PWC). The study assessed 54 monolingual BK-speaking children aged 3 to 5 years randomly selected from kindergartens in Zakho city. The assessment was carried out using the Bahdini Kurdish Articulation Test (Ahmed & Hasan, 2022). The results show that the mean score of segmental phonological accuracy measures for PCC is 89.36, for PVC 96.35 and for PPC 93.66. The whole-word skills mean score measures for PMLU is 6.99, for PWP 0.93 and for PWC 0.71. These scores show low rates of phonological metrics which indicate that phonological development is later in BK children in comparison to that of other languages. There is a significant effect of age on these measures, while no effect of gender is observed. The study of phonological development of BK is significant for cross-linguistic research or practical applications in speech pathology. ?t presents valuable opportunities for empirical and theoretical contributions to the broader understanding of human language and cognition.