Speech Sound Acquisition in Urdu-Speaking Children.
Saira Ambreen, Carol K S To
Urdu-speaking children's speech accuracy plateaus around age 5, but consonant mastery is slower than in most other languages studied.
Only one consonant reached the 90% mastery threshold by age 6. This is the typical pattern for Urdu, not a sign of disorder.
Key findings
1By age 6.0, only one consonant (/ŋ/) met the 90% mastery criterion, and no other consonant reached that level. At the 75% acquisition criterion, 25 of 38 consonants were acquired by the oldest group.
2Vowel accuracy was significantly higher than consonant accuracy in every age group, and initial consonant accuracy exceeded final consonant accuracy in every age group.
3Phoneme accuracy on all five measures (PPC, PCC, PVC, PICC, PFCC) showed significant age-related improvement, with the youngest group scoring significantly lower than middle and older groups, and no significant differences between middle and older groups, indicating a plateau around 5 years.
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What it does not show
The oldest children were 6.0 years, so the full developmental picture for a language with this many phonemes is incomplete; the authors note that extending to 9.0 years would give a more complete profile. Age groups were 6-month intervals, which may miss finer transitions between sounds. Only initial and final consonant accuracy were reported; medial consonant accuracy was not analysed separately. Spontaneous and imitated productions were not separated in scoring. In the youngest group, roughly 80% of responses involved direct or delayed imitation, so those scores may overestimate spontaneous production ability. Only singleton consonants were examined; consonant clusters, which are common in Urdu, were not studied. The study is cross-sectional, so it cannot show how individual children change over time or whether the observed reversals in accuracy reflect genuine phonological reorganisation.
Declared interests
The authors declare no conflicts of interest. The study was funded by the General Research Fund from the University Research Council (Project No. 17614717).
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the low mastery rates as evidence of speech disorder in Urdu-speaking children. This is the typical developmental pattern for a language with 38 consonant phonemes and multiple aspiration and retroflex-dental contrasts, not a sign that these children need intervention. The authors themselves note that the slower rate may reflect the complexity of the Urdu sound system and the multilingual context, rather than a developmental delay.
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