Phonological vulnerability for school-aged Spanish-English-speaking bilingual children

ABSTRACT

This study examined accuracy on syllable-final (coda) consonants in newly-learned English-like nonwords to determine whether school-aged bilingual children may be more vulnerable to making errors on English-only codas than their monolingual, English-speaking peers, even at a stage in development when phonological accuracy in productions of familiar words is high. Bilingual Spanish-English-speaking second-graders (age 7–9) with typical development (n = 40) were matched individually with monolingual peers on age, sex, and speech skills. Participants learned to name sea monsters as part of five computerized word learning tasks. Dependent t-tests revealed bilingual children were less accurate than monolingual children in producing codas unique to English; however, the groups demonstrated equivalent levels of accuracy on codas that occur in both Spanish and English. Results suggest that, even at high levels of English proficiency, bilingual Spanish-English-speaking children may demonstrate lower accuracy than their monolingual English-speaking peers on targets that pattern differently in their two languages. Differences between a bilingual’s two languages can be used to reveal targets that may be more vulnerable to error, which could be a result of cross-linguistic effects or more limited practice with English phonology.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingualism
• language transfer
• childhood bilingualism
• language skills

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health NIDCD Grant #R01 DC010784. It was the subject of the first author’s Master’s thesis, and portions of this work were first shared at the Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders in Madison, WI, in June of 2016. We are deeply grateful to the staff, research associates, school administrators, teachers, children, and families who participated. Key personnel included (in alphabetical order) Shara Brinkley, Gary Carstensen, Cecilia Figueroa, Karen Guilmette, Trudy Kuo, Bjorg LeSueur, Annelise Pesch, and Jean Zimmer. Many students also contributed to this work including (in alphabetical order) Genesis Arizmendi, Lauren Baron, Alexander Brown, Nora Schlesinger, Nisha Talanki, Hui-Chun Yang, and Atha Zimmermann.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Although /k/ and other phonemes designated ‘unshared codas’ may occur in syllable-final position occasionally in Spanish (Hualde 2005), these sounds occur as codas infrequently in most standard dialects of Spanish and are found only in a few words, typically borrowed from other languages (e.g., coñac /koɲak/ ‘cognac’) (Whitley 2002).

2 Participants in this manuscript represent a portion of the participants in a larger sample from Profiles of Working Memory and Word Learning for Educational Research (POWWER), funded by NIH NIDHC grant R01 DC010784. The POWWER study includes the groups reported, as well as children with language impairment (LI), children with dyslexia, and children with comorbid dyslexia and LI. Participants in the POWWER study completed a total of six word learning games and a comprehensive battery of working memory tasks (see Cabbage et al. 2017), completed over the course of at least six days. A portion of the data for the monolingual children in this study was reported in Alt et al. 2017. Data from the POWWER data set have also been published in (Green et al. 2016; Cowan et al. 2017; Gray et al. 2017).

3 The choice to use this cut-off point was data-based. Barragan et al. (2013) collected data on over 600 bilingual children in the greater Phoenix area. Had they used a standard score cut-off of 85 (1 SD below the mean) on the CELF-4 Spanish, more than 60% of the children in their study would have been classified as having language problems, which is implausible. Thus, 69 was 1 SD from their group mean and resulted in a more reasonable 11% of children below that score. More recently, using receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve analysis to analyze scores from a subsample of 299 bilingual children, Barragan et al. (2018) identified a cut off score of 78, which resulted in 9.6% of children being classified as having a language impairment and had sensitivity of 86% and a specificity of 80%.

4 Although the study included 40 bilingual participants, one child’s parent report did not provide information on home languages.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders: [grant number R01 DC010784].

Notes on contributors

Jessie A. Erikson

Jessie A. Erikson is a PhD student in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at the University of Arizona and is also pursuing a minor in Cognitive Science. She is interested in word learning and the intersection between word knowledge, cognition, and academic achievement in children with language disorders and typical language development.

Mary Alt

Mary Alt is an Associate Professor in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at the University of Arizona. Her work centers on the question: “How do people learn words and the concepts associated with them?” She has a particular interest in how learning occurs in people with Developmental Language Disorders and people who are bilingual. Dr Alt’s work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Shelley Gray

Shelley Gray is a certified speech-language pathologist and a professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on oral language, early literacy, reading, and working memory development and disorders in monolingual and bilingual children. Research projects include longitudinal, cross-sectional, and treatment efficacy studies in these areas funded by the Institute of Education Sciences and the National Institutes of Health.

Samuel Green

Samuel Green (PhD 1975, University of Georgia; recently deceased) was Professor in the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University. As a quantitative methodologist, his research focused on reliability estimation and challenges in the application of structural equation modeling, including exploratory methods and assessment of dimensionality, differences in means, and model fit. He served on editorial boards of Structural Equation Modeling, Psychological Methods, and Educational and Psychological Measurement. He also greatly enjoyed collaborating with colleagues on grant-funded (e.g., NIH) longitudinal projects and was highly valued by our group.

Tiffany P. Hogan

Tiffany P. Hogan, PhD, CCC-SLP (PhD 2006, University of Kansas) is Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the MGH Institute of Health Professions and Director of the Speech and Language Literacy Lab, both in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Her research examines intersects of working memory, language, reading, and speech in the developing child with a focus on oral and written disorders such as dyslexia, developmental language disorder, and speech sound disorders. Dr Hogan's work is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the US Institute of Education Sciences.

Nelson Cowan

Nelson Cowan (PhD 1980, University of Wisconsin) is Curators’ Distinguished Professor at the University of Missouri, where he has taught since 1985. He authored Attention and Memory: An Integrated Framework (1995, Oxford University Press), Working Memory Capacity (2016, Psychology Press and Routledge Classic Edition), and various journal articles on working memory, its relation to attention, and their childhood development. He has done collaborative work on amnesia, schizophrenia, dyslexia, and language impairment. His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1984. Currently, he is editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.