الفهرس 
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Abstract
-It contains introduction to the research, aim of the research, Importance , limitations of The research.
- Theorical Background : introduction, Psychological of language acquisition, phonological theories of Acquisition, Normal Language development, types of phonological investigations , the basic unit of acquisition, Literature Review.
- Method and Procedures, test desigen, the participants, test validity, recording method, testing session, transcription, statistical analysis.
- Results, discussion and conclusion
1.0. Introduction:
The study of phonological acquisition has been always a fundamental
point of interest because of its importance in many directions such as second
language acquisition as it’s the cornerstone of drawing teaching techniques. It’s
also important for the detection of speech and language disorders so as to have
the norms of children’s phonological acquisition and compare it with the
abnormal. Behaviorists began to care about language because it is one of the
most complex cognitive behaviors and they considered it as the gate to
understand what happens inside the brain. Therefore, they were concerned with
studying language to reach the other aspects of the human behavior.
In the study of language acquisition in general, more attention has been
given to English and Indo-European languages rather than other languages. This
is also true to the studies concerning phonological development. However, in
order to present a more comprehensible analysis of language acquisition, a due
concern should be given to other languages as well. In fact, a number of studies
have been to compare between English and Arabic; yet if more attention is
given, this could enrich the area with specific characteristics of each of these
languages, specifically Arabic.
1.1. Aim of the research
This research aims at answering the following questions:
1. How intelligible are Kuwaiti children at the age from 3-4 years old?
2. What is the phonemic inventory of these children’s speech?
3. What kind of phonological processes appear at this age?
4. What are the phonological characteristics of their speech?
1.2. Importance of the research
The new researches assume that first language acquisition begins bottomup
from the acquisition of the acoustic signal (where the acquisition of the
sound structure lies on the base) up to the acquisition of semantic and pragmatic
levels. Consequently, it allows a bootstrapping into higher levels of language
acquisition.
2
The results of the research are significant in many cases:
1. Helping to gather information about Kuwaiti Arabic as one of the Arabic
dialects and detecting the phonological developmental stages of Kuwaiti Arabic.
2. Determining the cases of abnormality through comparing a child with his
peers. The study of phonological development provides linguists with
framework on the language as a whole (Mathews,1996).
So far, most of the available research focuses on monolingual Jordanian
and Palestinian Arabic speakers (Amayreh, 2003; Amayreh and Dyson, 1998;
Dyson and Amayreh, 2000); with some work on Egyptian Arabic (Ammar and
Morsi, 2006; Omar, 1973) described in the following sub-sections.
1.3. Limitations of the research
There are some limitations on this study that must be accounted. These
limitations are presented as follows:
1. The speech sample is collected from Al-Ahmadi district only.
2. The target age of the study is 3-4 years old.
3. Some studies provide an extra transcription of the data by one or more
trained transcribers. The lack of experienced phonologists that are
familiar with the dialect led the researcher to depend on her transcription
of the speech data.
4. There is lack in the phonological studies that are made on Kuwaiti
Arabic. Most of the documented are made on Jordanian, Palestinian,
Egyptian, and a few studies on Kuwaiti Arabic.