Global perspectives in child phonology

This Special Issue of the International Journal of Speech Language Pathology on Global Perspectives in Child Phonology focuses on phonological development from a global perspective by taking a cross-linguistic and international approach to research. The impetus for the special issue emerged from the 2019 International Child Phonology Conference (ICPC) that gathered researchers from around the world. ICPC provides an opportunity for researchers that focus on child phonological development and disorders to come together, discuss, exchange and move this area of research forward. A hallmark of the 2019 meeting was the broad range of languages represented, and we are honoured to have the opportunity to continue this discussion within this special issue. Since the meeting, the world has been brought together around the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite the challenging times, the contributing authors submitted and revised innovative and exciting papers and we have been supported by Professor Barbara Dodd, from the IJSLP editorial team, and outstanding reviewers, who dedicated their limited time to moving this issue towards publication.

When speaking of the importance of global perspectives in research with colleagues in the health sciences, we find ourselves highlighting the importance of cross-linguistic research. A global and cross-linguistic perspective is particularly important in our work since our research focuses on language. Not only do we need to communicate clearly in the language(s) spoken by families, but we also need to understand what development, disorders and clinical practice look like in different languages and in different communities. As highlighted by the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication (2019), research is international, and multilingual research is essential to ensuring that research contributes to both global and local communities. In child phonology, although the vast majority of research is based on children who speak English, we have observed an increase in cross-linguistic research over the past 20 years. For example, in a recent analysis of consonant acquisition across languages, McLeod and Crowe (2018) identified 45 articles that reported on consonant acquisition in 26 languages other than English. Of these, 24 articles were published in the past 20 years. Despite this increase, the representation in international journals remains low with only half of the articles published in international journals, with the remaining studies published as undergraduate or graduate student reports (e.g. master’s thesis or dissertation). This discrepancy points at the systemic barriers to publishing in English for scholars for whom English is an additional language, including mastery of English grammar and genre conventions, and knowledge of publication processes and networks (e.g. Hanauer, Sheridan, & Englander, 2019). In speech-language pathology, it is important to support cross-linguistic research and also to encourage publication in national and local languages to ensure equitable access to research by families and stakeholders. At ICPC 2019, the cross-linguistic and international nature of research in child phonology was clear. We are excited to bring together eight papers on languages other than English. Using a framework proposed by Professor Dodd, most papers include an appendix that provides an overview of the phonology and phonetics of the language described in the text. These papers point to the importance of looking at children’s phonological development and disorders across languages.

The special issue begins with five papers that focus on child phonology in understudied languages. Zarifian and Fotuhi (2020) describe the phonological development of children who speak Persian and live in Iran. In their sample, they found some developmental patterns that were similar in Persian to other languages (e.g. higher accuracy in syllable initial position), but some phonemes that followed a slower course of development (e.g. initial /v/ and final /d/). Amoako, Stemberger, Bernhardt, and Tessier (2020) describe the acquisition of consonants in a group of children who speak Akan and live in Ghana. These researchers observed a common course of development for a subset of consonants, but later acquisition of /w/ and /l/. In addition, consonants with secondary articulation, such as labio-velarisation, were acquired later. Bérubé, Bernhardt, Stemberger, and Ciocca (2021) describe typical and protracted acquisition of consonants in children who speak French and live in Canada. They found that word length and word stress influenced consonant development in French. This finding highlights the importance of considering not only segmental accuracy, but also the context of the word. Abu El Adas, Washington, Sosa, Harel, and McAllister (2021) explore variability in word production in bilingual children who speak Jamaican Creole and English who live in Jamaica. They showed that the amount of variability was dependent on the language for bilingual children: in English, they were comparable to monolingual English children, but in Jamaican Creole they were more variable than in English. Lin, Lin, Wang, Wu, and Kong (2020) move beyond speech sound production to consider how phonological awareness develops in children who speak Mandarin and live in China. They showed that the teaching of Pinyin romanisation interacts with phonological awareness abilities, while Mandarin phonological awareness shows features characteristic of non-alphabetic languages. Together, these papers help us understand common paths of phonological development, and highlight language-specific phonemes, suprasegmental phenomena, and phonological awareness that influence child phonology.

The next three papers provide clinical perspectives on child phonology. Watts and Rose (2020) evaluated theoretical issues related to implicational relationships in child phonology that underlie clinical decision making in speech-language pathology. They reviewed longitudinal case studies of English, French, German, and Portuguese speaking children. From this cross-linguistic work, they proposed a new framework to guide selection of treatment targets. Meloni et al. (2021) explore clinical markers of Childhood Apraxia of Speech and their applicability to children who speak French and live in France. Their results showed that while some markers developed from research on English-speaking children are also found in French-speaking children, intrusive schwa and vowels were not common in these speakers. Finally, Ottow-Henning and Keij (2021) reported on group intervention for children who speak Dutch and who live in the Netherlands. They developed and implemented an innovative approach for group intervention for children with speech sound disorders and showed that this approach brought about improvements in the children’s phonological development. Together these papers provide much needed cross-linguistic perspectives on speech sound disorders and clinical applications.

By pulling these perspectives together, we are better able to understand which phenomena of child phonological development are specific to English and which are observed across other languages. By moving towards this global perspective, we also foster an international community of researchers. We hope you enjoy reading this work as much as we have enjoyed preparing this issue. The scope of research on phonology across languages is remarkable, includes many emerging researchers, and promises to continue to shine a bright path towards understanding child phonology and supporting children with speech sound disorders.

Declaration of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).