Phonological Measures for Bilingual Spanish-English–Speaking Preschoolers: The Language Combination Effect

Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine the diagnostic accuracy of traditional measures of phonological ability developed for monolingual English-speaking children with their bilingual peers in both English and Spanish. We predicted that a composite measure, derived from a combination of English and Spanish phonological measures, would result in higher diagnostic accuracy than examining the individual phonological measures of bilingual children separately by language. Method Sixty-six children, ages 3;3–6;3 (years;months), participated in this study: 29 typically developing bilingual Spanish-English–speaking children ( x = 5;3), five bilingual Spanish-English–speaking children with speech sound disorders ( x = 4;6), 26 typically developing monolingual English-speaking children ( x = 4;8), and six monolingual English-speaking children with speech sound disorders ( x = 4;9). Children were recorded producing single words using the Assessments of English and Spanish Phonology, and productions were phonetically transcribed and analyzed using the Logical International Phonetics Program. Overall consonants correct–revised; accuracy of early-, middle-, and late-developing sounds; and percent occurrence of phonological error patterns in both English and Spanish were calculated. Receiver operating characteristic curves and support vector machine models were applied to observe diagnostic accuracy, separately and combined, for each speaker group and each language. Results Findings indicated the combination of measures improved diagnostic accuracy within both the English and Spanish of bilingual children and significantly increased accuracy when measures from both languages of bilingual children were combined. Combining measures for the productions of monolingual English-speaking children did not increase diagnostic accuracy. Conclusion To prevent misdiagnosis of speech sound disorders in bilingual preschoolers, the composite phonological abilities of bilingual children need to be assessed across both gross and discrete measures of phonological ability. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.16632604

Interpreting Accent Marks as Hiatus Indicators: Syllabification Intuitions for io Sequences in US Spanish

This study considers the syllabification perceptions of heritage speakers of Spanish (HSS), second language learners, and monolingual speakers in words with io sequences in order to understand the differences between HSS and the other two groups. Participants completed a reading task and then a listening task in which they indicated the number of syllables in each stimulus perceived. Three different lexical stress patterns were tested: stress on i (like río), stress on o (like pidió), and atonic syllables (like folio). The results show that heritage participants behave like monolinguals with audio stimuli, but in the reading task they interpret orthographic accent marks as indicators that two vowels should be divided into separate syllables. This leads to accurate interpretations of stimuli with stress on i, since Spanish phonology dictates that stressed high vowels are syllabified in hiatus. Atonic syllables, which lack an orthographic accent, are correctly syllabified as diphthongs. However, heritage participants were less accurate with stress on o because they treated these stimuli like those with stress on i. These findings have implications for both linguistic theory and for pedagogy

Auditory-orthographic integration at the onset of L2 speech acquisition

Recent studies have provided evidence for both a positive and a negative effect of orthography on second language speech learning. However, not much is known about whether orthography can trigger a McGurk-like effect (McGurk & MacDonald, 1976) in second language speech learning. This study examined whether exposure to auditory and orthographic input may lead to a McGurk-like effect in naïve English-speaking participants learning a second language with Spanish phonology and orthography. Specifically, it reports on (a) production of non-target-like combinations such as [lj] as in [poljo] for <pollo>-[pojo], where the auditory Spanish [j] and the first language English [l] that correspond to the shared digraph <ll> are integrated, and (b) fusion quantified in terms of [z] devoicing such as [z̥apito] for <zapito>-[zapito]. Moreover, the effects of (a) type of grapheme-to-sound correspondence, (b) position in the word, and (c) condition of training and testing were examined. Participants were assigned to four groups: (a) auditory only, (b) orthography at training and production, (c) orthography at training, and (d) orthography at production. The positions included word-initial and word-medial. The grapheme-to-sound correspondences consisted of <v>-[b], <d>-[δ], <z>-[s] and <ll>-[j]. Results were indicative of a McGurk-like effect only for the Spanish digraph <ll>. The highest rate of combination productions was attested in the orthography-training condition in the word-medial position.