Variability across repeated productions in bilingual children speaking Jamaican Creole and English

Abstract

Purpose

Previous work suggests that variability across repeated productions of the same word may be useful in diagnosing speech sound disorder (SSD) in bilingual children. However, there is debate over what level of variability in transcribed productions should be considered typical even in monolingual speech development. High variability in the input represents a factor that could promote increased production variability in bilinguals. For this reason, the current study examines transcription-based token-to-token variability in bilingual children speaking Jamaican Creole (JC) and English.

Method

Twenty-five bilingual children aged 3;4–5;1 and twenty-five monolingual children aged 2;9–4;1 from a previous study were recorded producing eleven items in three repetitions.

Result

Contrary to our hypothesis, bilingual children showed similar rates of token-to-token variability compared to the monolingual children. In a separate analysis of bilingual data across languages, bilingual children were more variable in JC compared to English productions.

Conclusion

The difference between language contexts suggests that creole languages, which exist on a usage continuum, may be associated with increased variability in production. Our findings suggest that token-to-token production variability may be of similar clinical utility for bilingual and monolingual populations.

Keywords:

• bilingualism
• variability
• inconsistency assessment

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2020.1843712

Acknowledgements

We thank the research assistants Annika Canta, Sam Beames, Kristina Doyle, Olesia Gritsyk, Lauren Khoury, Tabitha McCloud-James, Melanie Basinger, Rachel Wright Karem, and Sarah Tuohy, who assisted in transcription and coding; the parents, preschoolers, teachers, staff, and school principals who made this study possible; Dr. Yvan Rose for his assistance with Phon software; Professors Laura and Richard Krestchmer for their commitment to the Jamaican Creole Language Project and Prof. Hubert Devonish (former Chair of the Jamaican Language Unit) for his guidance on the project.

Additional information

Funding

This research was financially supported by: (1) Jamaican Creole Language Project Endowment Fund; (2) The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders Research [R21DC018170-01A1].