Background: Distributional frequencies of linguistic units delineate language acquisition paths and help understand developmental processes. Phoneme frequency has an impact on language acquisition. Comparing input to child usage frequencies differentiates child phonological acquisition cross-linguistically and across languages in multilinguals. Such between-language comparisons are challenging due to the variable nature of language input and speaker usage. An ecosystemic theoretic account considers child-internal/external influences and the language specificities of the targeted linguistic systems.

Aims: A bilingual child’s phonologies at the lexical level are compared with the phonological distributions of common words in the respective targeted languages to highlight phonological frequency similarity/difference patterns between targets and produced child speech.

Method: Following parental consent, a Greek-English bilingual child’s spontaneous productions at 2;7 were IPA transcribed and aligned to audios in CHAT files (MacWhinney, 2000) totaling 540 Greek and 317 English words. The child’s lexical/phonological inventories are compared with the one thousand most common words in the languages (https://1000mostcommonwords.com).

Results: Greek and English words differ in word length (phoneme-syllable ratios: English 0.684, Greek 0.5), consonants-per-syllable (English 0.653, Greek 0.525), syllable distributions (English monosyllables 66%, Greek multisyllabic words 70%), syllable types (Greek CV 60%, V, CCV, CVC 10% each; English CVC 43%, CV, VC, CVCC, CCVC 10% each). There is overall word complexity similarity in both languages: 55% singleton-consonant words, 40% 1-cluster words, and 5% 2-cluster words. There is dissimilarity in the phonotactic distribution of consonants: Greek has 22% word-initial and 7.4% word-final Cs, and English has 33% in each category. The child’s usage distributions are compared to these results (e.g., English monosyllables: common 66.2%, child 65%; Greek monosyllables: common 4.7%, child 10.5%) informing how language-specific phonological complexity affects early cross-linguistic phonological performance.

Conclusions: Greek and English are phonologically dissimilar at the syllable and word level. The bilingual’s words are phonologically similar to the targeted most frequent words per language. Results show the self-similarity of child to adult language and how cross-linguistic differences impact phonological acquisition, informing bilingual clinical assessment/intervention strategies and second-language teaching methods.

Implications for children and families: You will find that the quality and quantity of parental and societal input in a language can substantially affect the speed, length, and success of bilingual speech acquisition in a child.

Implications for practitioners: You should determine the child’s and parents’ sociolinguistic context holistically, considering the role of context-specific quality and quantity of input in the multilingual child’s languages alongside individual language frequency specificities to disentangle a bilingual child’s typical from atypical patterns of speech development. You will use such information to guide your clinical provision and educational instruction protocols.

Key words: children’s voices, families’ voices, language input, frequency, communication, quantitative methods, multilingual

This presentation relates to the following United Nations Sustainable Development Goals:

• SDG 1: No Poverty
• SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being
• SDG 4: Quality Education