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English Speech Sound Development in Preschool-Aged Children From Bilingual English-Spanish Environments.
47 million people in the U.S. speak a language other than English. That represents 18% of the entire population. Spanish makes up the majority of this percentage, with Spanish being spoken as a second language in 10% of all households in the U.S. Most of the Spanish speaking population is young, and has more preschool aged children than any other ethnic group. Since English is the primary educational language, most Spanish speaking children grow up to be bilingual. The purpose of this study was to discover if learning two languages at the same time had any profound effect on the phoneme development of these children. The effect of having a bilingual childhood on speech development has not previously been studied before.
This experiment was conducted by Gildersleeve-Neumann, Kester, Davis and Pena. The purpose of the experiment was to discover if the home language of a child had an effect on both the acquisition of the second language, and the phoneme development.
Abstract
Created and presented by Erin Longbottom
Research conducted by: Christina E. Gildersleeve-Neumann Portland State University, Portland, OR Ellen S. Kester Barbara L. Davis Elizabeth D. Pena The University of Texas at Austin
Introduction
Method:
-The application of monolingual expectations to bilingual children is not valid for assessing the development of, or intervening in a problem with language development -It would be beneficial to teach bilingual students using their home language as a basis for the second language -Since the subjects were preschoolers, and they were only examined over the period of a school year, it is difficult to say if there is any real long term effect on phonological development in bilingual children -All the children progressed at the same rate, even though they came from different backgrounds of language knowledge -It is important to make clear that in no way does this study support the idea that learning one language is better than learning two languages -The final conclusion of the study is that the bilingual subjects will likely grow up to have fully capable language skills in both English and Spanish.
It was found that all the children could produce the full range of English vowels and most consonants. Interdental consonants had the widest gap of achievement, with 60% of E children, 35% of PE children and none of the ES children producing interdentals at T1. By T2, 100% of ES children, 90% of E children, and 80% of PE children were producing interdentals. All of the children could produce stops, nasals, glides, fricatives and liquids at both T1 and T2. At T1, 90% of E and PE children and 33% of ES children were producing affricates. By T2, All of E and PE children, and 2 of 3 ES children were producing affricates.Consonant clusters were more difficult for bilingual children. While 100% of E children were producing consonant cluster sequences in initial and final word positions at T1 and T2, 85% of PE children produced initial and final clusters, none of the children in the ES group could produce both initial and final clusters. By T2, there was only slight improvement in the PE group of the pronunciation of initial and final clusters, and while the children in the ES group had improved, only 1 fully mastered initial and final clusters.
Results
References
- 33 participants, between ages 3 years and 1 month, and 3 years and ten months. - Divided into the groups English only (E), Predominantly English (PE), and English and Spanish (ES) - all children were enrolled in the Head Start program in Texas - Spanish was rarely used in the classroom by either teachers or classmates. -Language usage at home varied widely, which was taken into account using a number of tests given by either the reesearchers or the teacher of the children. - Researchers examined the following information: parent report of languages spoken by extended family members, teacher report on language exposure and use, the average rating by six English-Spanish bilingual graduate student clinicians on children’s English-Spanish receptive and expressive knowledge based on their year-long regular classroom interactions with the children, as well as the languages spoken by the child during speech and language assessments. - Study conducted using a picture naming task -Tests were done at both the beginning and the end of the study.
Break down of groups
Participants
The language of the children was similar in many ways. As predicted, children had similar phonetic inventories in each language environment. While children with more exposure to English predictably made less errors, over time there were no significant differences between the three groups of children. All children increased in their accuracy of phoneme production, showing that they would grow to have full phonological capabilities. The error patterns that were observed related directly to the exposure to English. As the exposure increased, the errors grew less. The place where errors were most noticable were in the Spanish liquid /l/ sound and the tap and trill “r” sound. These sounds are produced differently in English. Children in the ES group tended to glide the /l/ sound, while using vocalization, the process of substituting a vowel for the trilled “r.” Both of these substitutions indicate a lower level of accuracy in phoneme production for phonemes that are different in English and Spanish. There were also several instances of sounds being produced by children that did not occur in the English phoneme inventory. However, these sounds were made by some children from all groups, so it was determined that this phoneme error was made due to ambient language exposure.
Discussion
Conclusion
