A Spanish pilot investigation for a crosslinguistic study in protracted phonological development

Abstract

A crosslinguistic study is underway concerning children’s protracted phonological development (i.e. speech sound disorders). The current article reports pilot Spanish data for this study from two 4-year-old boys with protracted phonological development. The purposes of the pilot study were to: (1) develop and evaluate a word list for elicitation that could be used across Spanish dialects and that sufficiently sampled Spanish word lengths, stress patterns, word shapes and phonemes; and (2) to derive hypotheses for the larger study, based on patterns found in these children’s speech, and a review of the literature. The two speakers showed some developmental patterns reported for other languages (e.g. constraints on production of liquids and word-initial consonants in unstressed syllables) but also patterns that may reflect Spanish phonological inventories, allophony and frequencies. These data helped consolidate the Spanish word list for elicitation and led to questions for the ongoing study concerning word structure, multisyllabic words, liquids, fricatives and vowel sequences.

• crosslinguistic
• Spanish
• phonological development
• phonological disorders

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the families for their participation, and one of the transcribers in Mexico, Mariana Reynosa. We gratefully acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding.

Declaration of interest: The second author (B. May Bernhardt) is co-author of a commercial phonological analysis programme, the Computerized Articulation and Phonology Evaluation System (CAPES; Masterson and Bernhardt, 2001), which was used for some of the phonological analyses for this article.

Notes

1. The term ‘speech sound disorders’ (phonological disorders) is prevalent in the field of speech-language pathology, but a more current, neutral and positive term ‘protracted phonological development’ is being used for the crosslinguistic study (as in Bernhardt and Stemberger, 1998).

2. In Granada Spanish, lax, open vowels occur if coda /s/ deletes (Alonso, Zamora, and Canellada, 1950; Zubizarreta, 1979; Gerfen, 2002; Alvar, 2009; Lloret and Jiménez, 2009), as in: tres /trɛ/ ‘three’, or dos /dɔ/ ‘two’.

3. In Mexican Spanish.

4. Other studies of consonant development include Acevedo (1993) and Jiménez (1987) for Mexican Spanish and Borzone de Manrique and Rosemberg (2000) for Argentinian Spanish.

5. The word list and the children’s data are available from the authors.

6. The final word list is also available from the authors.

7. The term constraint is used in a general sense (see Bernhardt and Stemberger, 1998).