Spanish/English bilingual speech sound development

What is it about?

The purpose of this study was to provide longitudinal data on Spanish-English phonological skills during the preschool years and examine the links between speech sound and morpho-syntactic performance as well as between phonological skills in the two languages. Thirty-five bilingual preschool children produced single-word speech samples in Spanish and English both at the beginning of their first and second year in a Head Start program. Conversational samples in both languages were also collected at these data points to calculate Mean Length of Utterance in words (MLUw) and thus assess the children’s linguistic proficiency. The phonetically transcribed speech samples were compared over time in terms of segmental accuracy measures and error pattern frequencies. Correlation analyses were run to examine the relation between segmental accuracy measures across languages and between speech sound production and MLUw. This study is the first to document developmental changes in the speech patterns of Spanish-English bilingual preschool children over one year. One-way within-subjects ANOVAs revealed significant improvements in accuracy over time in both languages, suggesting that enhanced exposure to the majority language at school may not impede phonological development in the home language. The results also revealed significant cross-linguistic correlations in segmental accuracy between Spanish and English, indicating that the same underlying speech motor production abilities may be utilized in both languages. Finally, the findings show that MLUw was significantly correlated with segmental accuracy measures, suggesting that children’s phonological skills develop together with skills in other language domains. Interestingly, phonological and morpho-syntactic skills remained related over time in English, but not in Spanish, suggesting that the relationship between phonological and multi-word production may possibly be mediated by language-specific phonological properties at later stages. The results of this study have theoretical as well as practical implications for professionals working with developing bilingual children.

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