Phonological complexity in intervention for Spanish-speaking children with speech sound disorder

ABSTRACT

The efficiency of intervention for children with speech sound disorder may be influenced by linguistic complexity of the phonological intervention target. Complex targets, particularly, later-acquired, less-known consonants and consonant clusters, have been linked to greater post-intervention generalization to untargeted phonological structures. Yet there is little direct evidence to support target selection based on linguistic complexity for Spanish-speaking children with speech sound disorder. This intervention study utilizes an experimental single-case design to examine the efficacy of intervention in Spanish using different complex targets (i.e. /ɡɾ/, /bɾ/, and /l/). For each of the four Spanish-speaking children with speech sound disorder, sounds at 0% accuracy during baseline were monitored across the baseline period, during and post-intervention, and at one- and two-month follow-up visits. Over the course of intervention, only one participant achieved mastery of the targeted structure in practiced words. However, all participants demonstrated some amount of broad phonological generalization to untargeted consonants or clusters. Variable learning trajectories and broad phonological generalization are discussed as they relate to participant characteristics and linguistic complexity.

KEYWORDS:

• Phonological disorder
• speech sound disorder
• Spanish
• bilingual
• intervention
• treatment

Acknowledgments

We express our gratitude to our young participants and their families. We thank the members of the Phonological Typologies Lab at San Diego State University, particularly Yureli Lopez, Mayerling Ovalles, and Katarina Richard for their leadership and coordination, as well as Jennifer Zaragoza, Monique Bareño, and Claudia Tellez for assistance with data collection. We are also grateful to Irina Potapova, Jennifer Taps Richard, and Leah Fabiano-Smith for their support, collaboration, and consultation in the development of this work.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no declarations of interest to report.

Notes

¹ Both participants with singleton targets were trained with /l/. This consonant is considered less complex in Spanish relative to English (McLeod & Crowe, 2018); however, its relative complexity may be different in the unique phonological system of a bilingual child (Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein, 2010). Nevertheless, it was the least accurate, most complex singleton available for target selection in both cases.

² It should be noted that the only singleton consonant at 0% accuracy across baselines for any of the children was trill /r/; thus, the absence of singleton change (excepting Jaime at 1 Month Post) reflects, specifically, unchanged accuracy of trill /r/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health under Grants NIDCD F31 DC017697 and NIDCD R21 DC01720.