The phonological skills of Samoan speaking 4-year-olds

To date there has been little research on the typical developmental patterns for children speaking Samoan. The research outlined in this paper serves to fill this gap by reporting on the phonological development of Samoan speaking children growing up in the English dominant language environment of Auckland New Zealand. In this study 20 children aged between 4;0 and 4;11 were assessed using a picture naming task that probed their knowledge of the Samoan phonemic inventory. The findings presented here give an indication of what children in their fifth year have as speech sounds in their phonetic inventory and the types of errors that they may still produce. These results demonstrate the similarities and differences that Samoan phonological development shares with other languages. In particular the differences that seem "atypical" when compared with studies on English are discussed. It is tentatively concluded that these differences may well be typical for Samoan speech acquisition given language specific factors and the bilingual context in which these children are growing up.