English speech acquisition in 3- to 5-year-old children learning Russian and English.

Purpose: English speech acquisition in Russian-English (RE) bilingual children was investigated, exploring the effects of Russian phonetic and phonological properties on English single-word productions. Russian has more complex consonants and clusters and a smaller vowel inventory than English.

Method: One hundred thirty-seven single-word samples were phonetically transcribed from 14 RE and 28 English-only (E) children, ages 3;3 (years;months) to 5;7.