Interference and Development of Articulation in Mother Tongue and Foreign Language in Preschool Children

The use of more than one language is characteristic of the majority of global population, including children with articulation disorders. Although in the field of bilingualism and learning a new language there is a large number of studies dealing with the influence of one language onanother, including children with dyslexia and developmental coordination disorder, to this day there has been a lack of research examining whether and to what extent the impaired articulation in the mother tongue affects the formation of the articulation base of the new language. The aim of the research was to determine the articulation patterns of the preschool children in their mother tongues, Serbian and French, and the connection between these patterns and articulation deviations in the foreign language they learn, namely, English. The research included 33 children of preschool age with articulation disorders from Belgrade who attended a preschool programme in English, and whose mother tongues are Serbian and French. To determine articulation deviations, diagnostic tests were used to assess articulation in all three languages. The obtained results indicate that there is a significant connection between articulation deviations in both native languages and articulation deviations in English. The research results confirmed theoretical implications of the impact of the transfer and interference of the mother tongue on the language being learned, in this case through changed articulation schemes and patterns of the phonemic-phonetic space of the new language. The importance of transferring articulation patterns from different mother tongues to the formation of the articulation base of a new language opens up space for further research, given that adequately constructed phonemic-phonetic patterns of the sounds of the language being learned influence an easier processing of the phonologically complex words, morphosyntactic markers that are spoken, but also a number of discourse functions and a successful oral communication, which is not the case in children with articulation deviations.