Multilingual Speech Acquisition by Vietnamese-English-Speaking Children and Adult Family Members.

This article presents a large-scale example of culturally responsive assessment and analysis of multilingual Vietnamese-English-speaking children and their family members using the VietSpeech Protocol involving (a) examining all spoken languages, (b) comparing ambient phonology produced by family members, (c) including dialectal variants in the definition of accuracy, and (d) clustering participants with similar language experience. The VietSpeech participants ( Children's Vietnamese consonant accuracy was significantly higher when dialectal variants were accepted (percentage of consonants correct-dialect [PCC-D]: Children's speech acquisition was influenced by cross-linguistic, dialectal, maturational, language experience, and environmental (ambient phonology) factors. Adults' pronunciation was influenced by dialectal and cross-linguistic factors. This study highlights the importance of including all spoken languages, adult family members, dialectal variants, and language proficiency to inform differential diagnosis of speech sound disorders and identify clinical markers in multilingual populations. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23290055.