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Original Articles

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

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Pages 1-26 | Received 25 Mar 2014, Accepted 19 Jul 2014, Published online: 13 Aug 2014
 

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.

Acknowledgements

We would first like to thank the children and families who participated in this study. We would also like to thank the Center for Research in Language (CRL) at the University of California San Diego (NIH Postdoctoral Training Grant 5-T32-DC0041, Marta Kutas, P.I.) for funding data collection for this project in conjunction with Dr. Jessica Barlow and the School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at San Diego State University. We also thank the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Division of Health Disparities (L60-MD006256) for providing support to the first author during the course of the project and the NIH National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) (Doctoral Training Grant T-32-DC009398) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) (SBE-0548130) for support of the second author during the course of this project. Finally, we thank Chelsea Bayley, Akinjide Famoyegun, Victoria Gullett and Shawnesha Wallace at the University of Arizona in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences for assistance with data analysis and Dr. Jessica Barlow for her comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Declaration of interest

The authors have no financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

Notice of Correction:

Changes have been made to this article since its original online publication date of 13 August 2014.

Notes

1This context has also been considered to be one of free variation in some Spanish dialects (e.g. Schwegler, Kempff, & Ameal-Guerra, Citation2010).

2Recall that the spirants are also found in word-initial position in the Mexican variety of Spanish (e.g. Barlow, Citation2003). Another related dialect feature in Mexican Spanish is the [v] for [b] sound substitution (Goldstein, Citation2001).

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