Acquisition of the stop-spirant alternation in bilingual Mexican Spanish–English speaking children: Theoretical and clinical implications

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to identify characteristics of typical acquisition of the Mexican Spanish stop-spirant alternation in bilingual Spanish–English speaking children and to shed light on the theoretical debate over which sound is the underlying form in the stop-spirant allophonic relationship. We predicted that bilingual children would acquire knowledge of this allophonic relationship by the time they reach age 5;0 (years;months) and would demonstrate higher accuracy on the spirants, indicating their role as the underlying phoneme. This quasi-longitudinal study examined children’s single word samples in Spanish from ages 2;4–8;2. Samples were phonetically transcribed and analyzed for accuracy, substitution errors and acoustically for intensity ratios. Bilingual children demonstrated overall higher accuracy on the voiced stops as compared to the spirants. Differences in substitution errors across ages were found and acoustic analyses corroborated perceptual findings. The clinical implication of this research is that bilingual children may be in danger of overdiagnosis of speech sound disorders because acquisition of this allophonic rule in bilinguals appears to differ from what has been found in previous studies examining monolingual Spanish speakers.

Bilingual Speech Sound Development During the Preschool Years: The Role of Language Proficiency and Cross-Linguistic Relatedness

“…In Spanish, stopping and flap/trill errors persisted at Time 2, occurring in 4.8% and 7.3% of instances, respectively, as documented in other studies (Goldstein & Washington, 2001). As pointed out above, the persistence of stopping errors is likely a result of incomplete acquisition of the stop-spirant alternation rule (Barlow, 2002;Fabiano-Smith et al, 2015). As to flap/trill errors, the results are in line with previous studies that document high rates of liquid simplifications at this age (Gildersleeve-Neumann et al, 2009;Goldstein & Washington, 2001;Prezas et al, 2014), although rates were higher in those studies, possibly due to differences in the analysis procedures and/or to the larger number of participants in the current study.…”

“…Indeed, 67% of English stopping errors at Time 2 were substitutions for /θ/ and /ð/. In Spanish, in contrast, the persistence of stopping errors is likely a result of incomplete acquisition of the stop-spirant alternation rule (Barlow, 2002;Fabiano-Smith et al, 2015), which requires underlying stops to be realized as stops when they occur utterance-initially, after homorganic nasals, and in the case of /d/ after laterals, while spirants occur in all other contexts (Branstine, 1991). For instance, 93% of stopping errors at Time 2 occurred on /β/, /ð/ and /ɣ/ when children produced items such as /ˈklaβo/, "nail," /ˈraðio/, "radio," and /aˈɣuxa/, "needle," as [ˈklabo], [ˈradio] and [aˈguxa], respectively.…”

Acoustic variation during passage reading for speakers with dysarthria and healthy controls

“…Yunusova et al, (2005) seemed to suggest that perceptual characteristics remain relatively constant throughout a reading task although more severe impairment may be associated with different within-task changes. However, Feenaughty, Tjaden and Sussman, (2014) reported sizeable variation in scaled intelligibility across sentences produced by speakers with PD who presented with mild impairment. Within-speaker variability may further have significance for understanding of factors contributing to intelligibility of connected speech in dysarthria (e.g., McHenry, 2003; Yunusova et al, 2005).…”

Perspectives on the rhythm–grammar link and its implications for typical and atypical language development

“…42 Some studies assessing other aspects of speech prosody production have not found significant deficits in SLI. 43,44 Yet there is evidence from both English and Italian that young children with SLI more frequently tend to omit weak syllables compared to their TD peers, 45, 46 relevant because grammatical morphemes, such as the plural “s”, often occur on weak syllables.…”