ABSTRACT

Purpose: This study investigates how native language interference, based on the countries of origin (China and Vietnam) of marriage migrant women, impacts the articulation and phonological variations in their children’s speech development. The ultimate goal is to proactively intervene and reduce articulation-related difficulties during the children’s critical speech development period. Methods: The participants were 29 elementary school children from multicultural families in South Korea, aged from 6 years 11 months to 12 years 11 months. The children consisted of 14 with Chinese backgrounds and 15 with Vietnamese backgrounds, all demonstrating receptive language skills within or above -1 standard deviation. Assessments were conducted individually by the researcher in quiet, isolated environments. Results: First, no statistically significant differences were found in correct articulation counts between the two groups. Both groups frequently exhibited errors in phonation types, highlighting significant difficulties, as well as omissions of final consonants. Second, common phonological variations observed included deaspiration, lenition, fortition, fronting (palatal, alveolar, velar), alveolarization, plosivization, bilabialization, omission of plosives, and nasalization, with no significant differences between groups. Conclusions: The observed articulation and phonological errors, especially frequent phonation type errors and final consonant omissions, reflect linguistic constraints inherent in Chinese and Vietnamese languages. Chinese lacks tense consonants within its phonetic structure, while Vietnamese struggles with precise differentiation despite phonetic similarities. These findings emphasize the necessity for proactive, targeted intervention strategies to effectively mitigate native language interference impacts in children from multicultural families.