An investigation of phonological skills in Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking 2-year-olds

Abstract

Researchers have been interested in separating common cross-linguistic phonological patterns (so-called 'universals') from language-specific ones. Previous studies typically have focused on a relatively small number of patterns (e.g., substitution patterns for target liquids, deletion patterns for clusters). The purpose of this study is to describe phonological skills of three Puerto Rican, Spanish-speaking 2-year-olds and to determine which patterns tend to be specific to Spanish and which ones are also exhibited commonly by speakers of a variety of languages. The study of Spanish represents an opportunity to continue examining a language that has a different ambient phonology and comes from a different language family than the languages examined in other studies of 2-year-olds: English, Cantonese and Igbo. Three monolingual, Spanish-speaking 2-year-olds living in Puerto Rico participated in the study. Independent and relational analyses of both consonants and vowels were conducted on the children's connected speech samples. Comparisons were then made to phonological profiles of other Spanish-speaking 2-year-olds and to 2-year-olds speaking languages other than Spanish. The results indicated that the Puerto Rican, Spanish-speaking children exhibited phonological skills that were both comparable to and divergent from those exhibited by 2-year-old speakers of other languages.

• Spanish Phonological Patterns