Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Giuliana O’Connell
Northeastern University
ENGW 3307
Professor Musselman
20 October, 2019
Word Count: 2427
APA Formatting
PHONOLOGICAL ACQUISITION IN BILINGUAL CHILDREN: A REVIEW 2
Abstract
Bilingual children are at once over- and under-diagnosed with speech and language disorders.
Some of the gaps in care that they experience may be explained by a lack of understanding of
typical and disordered bilingual language acquisition and language interaction. The focus of this
bilinguals as well as bilinguals with developmental language delays (DLD). The studies
evaluated agree that appearance of slight delays may be found in one or both of the phonetic
inventories of TD bilinguals when compared to inventories of their monolingual peers, but did
not have any consensus on the theories of transfer, acceleration, and deceleration. Additionally,
evidence was found for separation of the two inventories with some children having acquired
phonemes in one of their languages but not yet the other. This separation of phonetic inventories
indicates a need for DLD testing and treatment in both of a child’s languages.
PHONOLOGICAL ACQUISITION IN BILINGUAL CHILDREN: A REVIEW 3
Little is known about the phonological acquisition and disordered speech of bilingual
children compared to the knowledge about their monolingual counterparts. With increasing
awareness of the needs of bilingual children, the lack of research on what typical bilingual
development looks like may be impeding diagnostic accuracy for speech and language disorders
and delays. The most easily recognizable of the speech and language disorders for parents,
teachers, and Speech Language Pathologists (SLPs) are phonological disorders, due to their
language disorders, we first need to know how phonological development is affected in bilingual
children and what these effects may show in individuals with phonological disorders. It had long
been assumed that interaction between languages in bilingual children would impede their
overall language development. While this theory has lost major traction, it is still unknown how
and if the languages interact and what those interactions might result in.
Methodology
This paper reviews research published in the last ten years on normative and disordered bilingual
phonological acquisition in children who are simultaneous bilinguals. As there are relatively few
articles published on this topic, the main criteria for inclusion in this paper was original research
Variation in Studies.
Studies in this review included those with both bilingual and monolingual typically
developing (TD) and developmental language delay (DLD) participants, studies with only
PHONOLOGICAL ACQUISITION IN BILINGUAL CHILDREN: A REVIEW 4
bilingual TD and DLD participants, and studies with bilingual and monolingual TD participants.
Participant Selection. Inclusion criteria varied by study with some taking in more data
on participants than others such as the inclusion of participant handedness in Marini et al. (2018).
Other studies appeared to have deficits in diversity of demographics regarding parental education
for one or more language which may result in skewed data due to input differences in the home
environments (Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein, 2009). Three studies, two of which used the same
sets of data, controlled for dialects in their participant selection (Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein,
2009, Fabiano-Smith & Barlow, 2010, Fabiano-Smith & Hoffman, 2018) which should create
Notably, five out of the eight studies included used Spanish as one of the languages of
study and five used English as one of the languages of study, following a larger pattern of Euro-
centric data collection (Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein, 2009, Fabiano-Smith & Barlow, 2010,
Fabiano-Smith & Hoffman, 2018, Rossouw & Pascoe, 2018, Montenari et al., 2018, Aguilar-
Mediavilla et al., 2019). Table 2 shows the languages and tests used by each study examined. The
trend towards European data may be explained by frequency of use in the contexts of study with
all but one of the studies originating in English or Spanish speaking majority countries.
Study Methods. In the studies reviewed, all eight involved a single word production
task, many using pictures to elicit naming responses from participants. This type of task is
beneficial when gathering data from many participants as it allows for the researcher to target
specific phonemes while still eliciting spontaneous production. In addition to the single word
Marini et al., 2019). In both studies, this was achieved by presenting participants with photos
PHONOLOGICAL ACQUISITION IN BILINGUAL CHILDREN: A REVIEW 5
containing lexical minimal pairs and asking participants to point to the photo matching the word
spoken by the researcher (Aguilar-Mediavilla et al., 2019, Marini et al., 2019). This method
creates data which pairs well with the phonemic production data and would help to ensure that
participants with DLD were correctly diagnosed and not experiencing an articulation issue. A
single longitudinal study was conducted (Montenari et al., 2018) evaluating the phonetic
inventories of children in a Head Start preschool program at the beginning of their first year of
Bilingual Development
Bilingual children are at higher risk for both over and under-diagnoses with speech and
language impairments (Marini et al., 2019) (Montenari et al., 2018). SLPs may confuse language
differences for language delays or impairments leading to incorrect diagnoses (Marini et al.,
2019). Similarly, speech and language delays may go overlooked in bilingual children as they
can be attributed to language differences. Bilingual children are thought to exhibit a slower
phonological acquisition process than their monolingual peers as they are acquiring the
phonemes of two languages (Montenari et al., 2018). The slow phonological development is
especially pronounced in the earliest stages of their language development and the children
usually catch up to or exceed the abilities of their peers by age 5 (Montenari et al., 2018). It is in
the stages from 3-5 years old when potential for positive and negative misdiagnosis is highest
(Fabiano-Smith & Hoffman, 2018). Three processes of language interaction are observed in
bilingual phonological acquisition and are discussed in all of the eight studies reviewed. These
processes are transfer, acceleration, and deceleration. Transfer effects can be seen when children
use phonemes exclusive to one of their languages, in speech in the other language (Fabiano-
Smith & Goldstein, 2009). Acceleration is a process similar to that of bootstrapping, where the
PHONOLOGICAL ACQUISITION IN BILINGUAL CHILDREN: A REVIEW 6
child uses knowledge and skills from one language to aid in, and speed up their acquisition of the
other language (Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein, 2009). Deceleration is a process in which a child
experiences negative effects on their language acquisition due to interference from their other
Findings
Agreement on a general lack of research on the topic was noted by all studies examined.
Additionally, those sounds found in both of a participant’s languages were consistently stronger
in their inventories (Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein, 2009, Montenari et al., 2018), though this
finding may also be explained by these sounds occurring at high frequencies cross-linguistically
(Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein, 2009). As hypothesized by all studies which examined participants
with DLD, the bilingual DLD participants had weaker phonetic inventories than their TD
counterparts (Aguilar-Mediavilla et al., 2019, Marini et al., 2019) Evidence for a separation of
the phonemic systems was noted in one study, with participants having demonstrated acquisition
of sounds which occur in both languages, in only one language and not the other (Fabiano-Smith
& Barlow, 2010). In addition to separation of phonetic inventories, transfer was also found
across studies with participants using phonemes unique to one of their languages in speech in the
other (Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein, 2009, Fabiano-Smith & Barlow, 2010, Montenari et al., 2018,
Rossouw & Pascoe, 2018). Similarly conflicting results were noted for acceleration and
deceleration (Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein, 2009, Fabiano-Smith & Barlow, 2010). Those studies
which did not have monolingual participants noted positive and negative transfer effects instead
as they could not make claims of acceleration or deceleration without monolingual data to
compare to (Lam & To, 2017, Montenari et al., 2018). The single longitudinal study (Montenari
PHONOLOGICAL ACQUISITION IN BILINGUAL CHILDREN: A REVIEW 7
et al., 2018) found greater advances in the language of instruction in school in participants’
Results from Fabiano-Smith & Barlow (2010) indicating the separation of phonetic
inventories between languages would call for evaluation and treatment in both of the child’s
languages. While findings about acceleration (Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein, 2009, Fabiano-Smith
& Barlow, 2010) indicate that language learning in one language can aid in that of another, it is
yet unknown whether speech therapy treatment experiences these same effects. Research is
needed to better understand potential acceleration effects of speech therapy treatment for DLD
Rossouw & Pascoe were the only researchers to document results pre- and post-treatment
(2018). In their case study, treatment was administered to the isiXhosa and English bilingual
participant only in English though the researchers noted dual language treatment is the ideal
method. The decision to use English as the language of treatment was made in order to replicate
what are most common treatment environments in the country of study (Rossouw & Pascoe,
2018). Treatment was found to be effective for reducing instances of gliding, a phonological
process which was appropriate at the participant’s age in English but not isiXhosa, but no
(Rossouw & Pascoe, 2018). The retention of consonant cluster reduction may be explained by
the lack of consonant clusters in isiXhosa (Rossouw & Pascoe, 2018)., indicating potential
Discussion
demonstrate the messy appearance of bilingual acquisition data. These conflicting results point
bilinguals but instead a combination of processes working with and against each other. While
bilingual acquisition was slightly behind that of monolinguals in all studies which included
monolinguals (Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein, 2009, Fabiano-Smith & Barlow, 2010, Fabiano-
Smith & Hoffman, 2018), none of the studies found it to be a significant difference. One issue
noted with the studies examined, was sample size. The two studies looking at single participant
groups, maintained high numbers of participants with 54 and 35 respectively (Lam & To, 2017,
Montenari et al., 2018). All other studies maintained smaller numbers of participants hovering
around ten participants per research demographic limiting data output (see Table 1). An
exception to this pattern is the study by Rossouw & Pascoe (2018), with only a single participant.
More data is necessary to find potential patterns which may not be evident from the limited
research completed on the topic. Additionally, research to create phonetic inventories for
different stages of typical development in bilinguals would be useful in creating diagnostic tools
for SLPs, however; these studies have demonstrated that unique inventories would be needed for
each combination of languages in order to accurately reflect the population which they represent.
As of this time, research by Dr. Fabiano-Smith appears to be the most robust research existing on
the topic. More data collection and analysis in the comparative style seen in Dr. Fabiano-Smith’s
research could yield productive results. The lack of expansion on separation of phonemic
inventories which was noted in Fabiano-Smith & Barlow (2010) is surprising. Additional
PHONOLOGICAL ACQUISITION IN BILINGUAL CHILDREN: A REVIEW 9
References
Phonetics. doi:10.1080/02699206.2019.1619096
Core, C., & Scarpelli, C. (2015). Phonological Development in Young Bilinguals: Clinical
Retrieved from
https://www.academia.edu/15851419/What_Bilingualism_Tells_us_About_Phonological
_Acquisition
Marini, A., Sperindè, P., Ruta, I., Savegnago, C., & Avanzini, F. (2019). Linguistic Skills in
Montanari Simona, Mayr Robert, & Subrahmanyam Kaveri. (2018). Bilingual Speech Sound
Development During the Preschool Years: The Role of Language Proficiency and Cross-
2467–2486. doi:10.1044/2018_JSLHR-S-17-0393
Rossouw, K., & Pascoe, M. (2018). Intervention for bilingual speech sound disorders: A case
McLeod, S., & Goldstein, B. (2012). Multilingual aspects of speech sound disorders in children.
ebooks/detail.action?docID=922853
Kitty K.Y. Lam, & Carol K.S To. (2017, November 1). Speech sound disorders or differences:
Insights from bilingual children speaking two Chinese languages- ClinicalKey. Retrieved
com.ezproxy.neu.edu/#!/content/playContent/1-s2.0-
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Tables
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my peer reviewer Jacob Wikar for contributing the view of a non-linguist. I
would also like to thank Leah Doroski for her multiple peer reviews, continued support, and
allowing me to excitedly talk about linguistics that may only interest me. I would like to
acknowledge the hand that all of my former and current Linguistics professors have had in
shaping my interests and abilities within the field. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Cecelia
Musselman for her support, encouragement, insights on writing, and most importantly edits and
reviews.
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