The relationship of phonological skills to language skills in Spanish–English-speaking bilingual children

Abstract

These two studies investigate the relationship between phonological production skills and performance in other domains of language in Spanish–English-speaking bilingual children. We examine the relationship between scores on a single-word phonology test and language measures selected from formal testing and narrative samples in Spanish and English. The first study explores the language and phonology scores of 186 children (mean age  =  5 years, 9 months) who represent a range of language ability levels. Phonology scores in both languages were most strongly correlated with performance on the Spanish morphosyntax subtest of the bilingual English–Spanish assessment and grammaticality of utterances in English narratives. The second study focuses on 12 children with low or high phonology skills selected from those who participated in the first study. Children with higher phonological production accuracy in both languages produced grammatical structures of low-phonetic salience with greater accuracy than children with lower phonological skills.

Keywords:

• Morphosyntax
• vocabulary
• language impairment
• phonology

Declaration of Interest: This research was funded by a grant R01DC007439 from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD). The authors report no conflicts of interest.