scholarly journals Dialect density in bilingual Puerto Rican Spanish-English speaking children

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Fabiano-Smith ◽  
Rebecca Shuriff ◽  
Jessica A. Barlow ◽  
Goldstein Brian A.

It is still largely unknown how the two phonological systems of bilingual children interact. In this exploratory study, we examine children’s use of dialect features to determine how their speech sound systems interact. Six monolingual Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking children and six bilingual Puerto Rican Spanish-English speaking children, ages 5–7 years, were included in the current study. Children’s single word productions were analyzed for (1) dialect density and (2) frequency of occurrence of dialect features (after Oetting & McDonald, 2002). Nonparametric statistical analyses were used to examine differences within and across language groups. Results indicated that monolinguals and bilinguals exhibited similar dialect density, but differed on the types of dialect features used. Findings are discussed within the theoretical framework of the Dual Systems Model (Paradis, 2001) of language acquisition in bilingual children.

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Fabiano-Smith ◽  
Katherine Hoffman

Purpose Bilingual children whose phonological skills are evaluated using measures designed for monolingual English speakers are at risk for misdiagnosis of speech sound disorders (De Lamo White & Jin, 2011). Method Forty-four children participated in this study: 15 typically developing monolingual English speakers, 7 monolingual English speakers with phonological disorders, 14 typically developing bilingual Spanish–English speakers, and 8 bilingual children with phonological disorders. Children's single-word speech productions were examined on Percentage Consonants Correct–Revised (Shriberg, Austin, Lewis, McSweeny, & Wilson, 1997a) and accuracy of early-, middle-, and late-developing sounds (Shriberg, 1993) in English. Consonant accuracy in English was compared between monolinguals and bilinguals with and without speech sound disorders. Logistic regression and receiver operating characteristic curves were used to observe diagnostic accuracy of the measures examined. Results Percentage Consonants Correct–Revised was found to be a good indicator of phonological ability in both monolingual and bilingual English-speaking children at the age of 5;0. No significant differences were found between language groups on any of the measures examined. Conclusions Our results suggest that traditional measures of phonological ability for monolinguals could provide good diagnostic accuracy for bilingual children at the age of 5;0 years. These findings are preliminary, and children younger than 5;0 years should be examined for risk of misdiagnosis.


Author(s):  
Leah Fabiano-Smith ◽  
Chelsea Privette ◽  
Lingling An

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


1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 394-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raquel T. Anderson

Data on personal pronoun development in Spanish-speaking children was obtained in this study. Forty monolingual Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 2;0 and 3;11 participated in the investigation. Two tasks were designed to obligate production of nominative and object pronouns in both reflexive and non-reflexive forms. Productive use and error analysis data were obtained and compared to previous data on pronoun development in English. By contrast with the order of productive use of grammatical case distinctions reported in the literature for English-speaking children, the children in the present study demonstrated a pattern in which nominative pronoun use preceded object case use. Implications of these findings for developmental theories that have been presented to explain pronoun development are discussed.


2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 708-723 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharynne McLeod ◽  
Sarah Verdon

Purpose In this study, the authors aimed to evaluate instruments designed to assess children's speech production in languages other than English. Method Ninety-eight speech assessments in languages other than English were identified: 62 were commercially published, 17 published within journal articles, and 19 informal assessments. A review was undertaken of 30 commercially published assessments that could be obtained. Results The 30 instruments assessed 19 languages: Cantonese, Danish, Finnish, German, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Maltese-English, Norwegian, Pakistani-heritage languages (Mirpuri, Punjabi, Urdu), Portuguese, Putonghua (Mandarin), Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. The majority (70.0%) assessed speech sound production in monolingual speakers, 20.0% assessed one language of bilingual speakers, and 10.0% assessed both languages of bilingual speakers. All used single-word picture elicitation. Approximately half (53.3%) were norm-referenced, and the number of children in the normative samples ranged between 145 and 2,568. The remaining assessments were criterion-referenced (50.0%) (one fitted both categories). The assessments with English manuals met many of the psychometric criteria for operationalization; however, only 2 provided sensitivity and specificity data. Conclusions Despite the varying countries of origin, there were many similarities between speech assessments in languages other than English. Few were designed for use with multilingual children, so validation is required for use in English-speaking contexts.


1996 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 333-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raquel T. Anderson

Most normative data available for assessing resonance through instrumentation have been collected with English-speaking individuals. The present study aimed at providing initial data on Spanish for use with the nasometer. Mean nasalance scores were obtained from 40 normal Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking females while they read three types of stimuli: (1) sentences containing nasal consonants, (2) a reading passage with both oral and nasal consonants, and (3) a reading passage with oral consonants. Results indicated significant differences In mean nasalance scores across the nasal sentences, as well as the two paragraph stimuli. In addition, a high degree of intersubject variability in the production of the target stimuli was evidenced. Comparisons with previous English normative data with similar reading stimuli are made and possible avenues for further research on the use of the nasometer with Spanish-speaking populations are discussed.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-39
Author(s):  
Krystal L. Werfel ◽  
Marren C. Brooks ◽  
Lisa Fitton

Although speech–language pathologists increasingly make use of tablets in clinical practice, little research to date has evaluated the effectiveness or efficiency of tablet use for targeting speech sound goals. The twofold purpose of this study was to compare (a) the effectiveness and (b) the efficiency of speech sound intervention using tablets versus flashcards. Four kindergarten students with at least two similar speech sound errors participated in this adapted alternating treatments single subject design study that explored the functional relation between speech sound intervention that differed by modality of delivery (tablet vs. flashcards) and increased speech sound skill in elementary school children with speech sound errors. Flashcards and tablets were both effective single-word speech sound intervention modalities; however, for three of the four participants, flashcards were more efficient than tablets.


2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 313-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peggy F. Jacobson ◽  
Richard G. Schwartz

Grammatical measures that distinguish language differences from language disorders in bilingual children are scarce. This study examined English past tense morphology in sequential bilingual Spanish/English-speaking children, age 7;0–9;0 (years;months). Twelve bilingual children with language impairment (LI) or history of LI and 15 typically developing (TD) bilingual children participated. Thirty-six instances of the past tense including regular, irregular, and novel verbs were examined using an elicited production task. By examining English past tense morphology in sequential bilinguals, we uncovered similarities and differences in the error patterns of TD children and children with LI. The groups differed in the overall accuracy of past tense use according to verb type, as well as the characteristic error patterns. Children with LI performed lower than their TD peers on all verb categories, with an interaction between verb type and group. TD children were better at producing regular verbs and exhibited more productive errors (e.g., overregularization). Conversely, children with LI performed relatively better on irregular verbs and poorest on novel verbs, and they exhibited more nonproductive errors (e.g., bare stem verbs). The results have important clinical implications for the assessment of morphological productivity in Spanish-speaking children who are learning English sequentially.


2021 ◽  
pp. 009385482110179
Author(s):  
Thomas Wojciechowski

Social learning theory is one of the most prominent criminological theories of the 20th century. The dual systems model represents an emerging framework in recent years, which may help to better understand how social learning processes are influenced by sensation-seeking and impulse control. This study utilized data from all waves of the Pathways to Desistance study. A series of mixed-effects models were utilized to test for moderating effects of these constructs on offending outcomes. Impulse control moderated the relationship between deviant peer association and offending frequency, indicating that high levels of both constructs predicted increased offending frequency. Sensation-seeking moderated the relationship between deviant peer association and odds of offending, indicating that high levels of both constructs were associated with greater odds of offending although this moderation effect was only marginally significant.


1996 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Cameron

ABSTRACTThe Functional Compensation Hypothesis (Hochberg 1986a, b) interprets frequent expression of pronominal subjects as compensation for frequent deletion of agreement marking on finite verbs in Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS). Specifically, this applies to 2sg.túwhere variably deleted word-final -smarks agreement. If the hypothesis is correct, finite verbs with agreement deleted in speech should co-occur more frequently with pronominal subjects than finite verbs with agreement intact. Likewise, social dialects which frequently delete agreement should show higher rates of pronominal expression than social dialects which less frequently delete agreement. These auxiliary hypotheses are tested across a socially stratified sample of 62 speakers from San Juan. Functional compensation does show stylistic and social patterning in the category of Specifictú, not in that of Non-specifictú. However, Non-specifictúis the key to frequency differences between -s-deleting PRS and -s-conserving Madrid; hence the Functional Compensation Hypothesis should be discarded. (Functionalism, compensation, null subject, analogy, Spanish, Puerto Rico)


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-160
Author(s):  
Malte Rosemeyer

Abstract The present paper analyzes and compares the use of clefted wh-interrogatives in spoken Madrid Spanish, Puerto Rican Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. In a first step, a typology of the discourse functions of clefted wh-interrogatives is established. This typology is partially governed by the strength of the presupposition of the proposition of the wh-interrogative. The results suggest the existence of two distinct constructionalization processes 1 March 2021. First, in the Spanish dialects, clefted wh-interrogatives with copula deletion are specialized in the expression of interactional challenges. Second, both Puerto Rican Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese evidence a change in the use of information-seeking clefted wh-interrogatives towards contexts in which the proposition of the interrogative is not activated. Consequently, in these dialects clefted wh-interrogatives can be used to establish questions not related to the current Question Under Discussion. However, this semantic change can be characterized as a constructionalization process only in Brazilian Portuguese.


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