Usual and unusual phonological processes in monolingual and bilingual French-speaking children

In the phonological acquisition literature, a distinction is made between usual and unusual phonological processes. Usual processes are present in the speech of young children with typical development (TD), whereas unusual processes are infrequent. Studies, however, have documented unusual processes in the speech of bilingual children. This study examines the frequency of usual and unusual phonological processes in the speech of French-speaking monolingual and bilingual children with TD. Three existing datasets were analysed. Each dataset contained the speech productions of 40 children with a mean age of 2;5-2;6 (for a total number of 78 monolingual and 42 bilingual participants). Two datasets were obtained through picture-naming tasks; one dataset contained spontaneous speech samples. Results indicated that both sets of phonological processes were of low frequency across all children. Only two usual processes, cluster reduction and palatal fronting, were present in 10% or more children in all three datasets. Unusual processes were less frequent than typical processes, although two unusual processes, unusual cluster reduction and palatalisation of /s/ were also present in the speech of 10% or more children in one of the three datasets. There were few differences in the frequency of unusual processes in bilingual versus monolingual children. We provide a tentative list of usual versus unusual phonological processes in French, which may prove useful for clinicians when diagnosing speech sound disorder.