Bilingual and monolingual children’s articulation rates during nonword repetition tasks

Aims and objectives: We know little about how the rate of speaking develops in bilingual children. The purpose of the current investigation was to explore the second language (L2) articulation rate in Spanish-English bilingual kindergarten children, and to compare the rates with those of monolingual English-speaking peers. Method/design: We performed a group-level, longitudinal study comparing articulation rates in two language groups (monolingual and bilingual). Data and analysis: Sixty-two monolingual English-speaking children and 62 Spanish-English bilingual peers repeated English-based nonwords of two-, three-, and four-syllable length; half contained complex syllable constructions (i.e., consonant clusters). Accuracy was treated as a measure of phonological knowledge. Articulatory duration for each nonword production was calculated, and duration measures were converted to syllables per second. English standardized vocabulary and phonological processing tests also were administered. Follow-up analyses compared a subsample of 19 Spanish-dominant children to 19 monolingual peers with relatively high language performance. Results: Bilingual children’s scores were significantly lower than those of their monolingual peers for English vocabulary, nonword repetition accuracy, and phonological processing. Despite this discrepancy, there was no statistically significant difference in the articulation rates of the two language groups either at the beginning or end of kindergarten. Nonwords with more frequent English phonological patterns were produced faster than nonwords with less frequent phonological patterns. Despite their increase in English language skills across the school year, neither language group experienced accompanying differences in articulation rate. Conclusions: These results demonstrate that Spanish-English bilingual children’s articulation rate while repeating nonwords of various length and complexity is similar to that of monolingual children’s, despite the bilingual children’s limited English phonological knowledge as measured by nonword repetition accuracy and sound matching. This runs contrary to expectations based on mainstream models that rely on frequency effects. We speculate that bilingual performance might be related to peer influences secondary to L2 immersion.