It has been recently reported that 22% of children less than 5 years of age living in the United States are Hispanic (Facts for Features, 2008). While Spanish is currently a minority-language, the growing Hispanic population indicates that this may change in the years to come. With that in mind, schools across the nation should consider hiring more speech language pathologists (SLPs) and/or providing further bilingual assessment training for their current SLPs. Especially in densely populated cities, Spanish-English bilingual children are struggling academically. If the Hispanic population continues to grow, it can be assumed that SLPs will have a heavy workload in this specific area. They will be dealing with pronunciation differences
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Bilingual children may also have poor phonological reception because of sounds that do not exist in their native language. These phonological difficulties may have a negative impact on academic writing. These phonological obstacles may also discourage a child, and cause a lack of confidence, making the path to academic success very unstable. Unless well-planned strategies are implemented to encourage academic achievement, a child will fall behind in school quickly.
It is widely known that every language varies in its number and type of phonemes. It is easy for an individual to identify a sound that is not in his or her language, but sometimes it is hard to generate that new sound. Spanish-English bilingual children typically have trouble knowing what sounds an English grapheme makes because of their existing knowledge on what sounds that same grapheme makes in Spanish. In one study, researchers examined the production of the initial /j/ phoneme by Spanish-English bilingual children, and found errors such as substituting the glide in yellow …show more content…
(2009) researched articulation and phonology in both languages of typically developing Spanish-English preschool children. The four- and five-year-old participants consisted of ten males and six females. All participants were simultaneous bilinguals, meaning they had spoken both languages since they were born. Both languages of each child were tested using the same assessment given in Goldstein and Washington’s (2001) study. Brice et al. (2009) used the same photo and label-eliciting question method, but the photos chosen in this study were specifically aimed to elicit all final and initial phonemes in Spanish. This allowed a more detailed analysis and comparison to English phonemes. Brice et al. (2009) found that stopping and velar fronting were the two phonological patterns that were significantly different. The study further explained that stopping is more difficult in English than in Spanish because there are many fricatives in English that can subsequently be stopped. On the contrary, only one Spanish fricative can be stopped. These findings on fricatives give a possible explanation for the complications children displayed in producing fricatives in Goldstein and Washington’s (2001) study. Both studies point out specific pronunciation difficulties that Spanish-English bilingual children tend to
Bilingual children may also have poor phonological reception because of sounds that do not exist in their native language. These phonological difficulties may have a negative impact on academic writing. These phonological obstacles may also discourage a child, and cause a lack of confidence, making the path to academic success very unstable. Unless well-planned strategies are implemented to encourage academic achievement, a child will fall behind in school quickly.
It is widely known that every language varies in its number and type of phonemes. It is easy for an individual to identify a sound that is not in his or her language, but sometimes it is hard to generate that new sound. Spanish-English bilingual children typically have trouble knowing what sounds an English grapheme makes because of their existing knowledge on what sounds that same grapheme makes in Spanish. In one study, researchers examined the production of the initial /j/ phoneme by Spanish-English bilingual children, and found errors such as substituting the glide in yellow …show more content…
(2009) researched articulation and phonology in both languages of typically developing Spanish-English preschool children. The four- and five-year-old participants consisted of ten males and six females. All participants were simultaneous bilinguals, meaning they had spoken both languages since they were born. Both languages of each child were tested using the same assessment given in Goldstein and Washington’s (2001) study. Brice et al. (2009) used the same photo and label-eliciting question method, but the photos chosen in this study were specifically aimed to elicit all final and initial phonemes in Spanish. This allowed a more detailed analysis and comparison to English phonemes. Brice et al. (2009) found that stopping and velar fronting were the two phonological patterns that were significantly different. The study further explained that stopping is more difficult in English than in Spanish because there are many fricatives in English that can subsequently be stopped. On the contrary, only one Spanish fricative can be stopped. These findings on fricatives give a possible explanation for the complications children displayed in producing fricatives in Goldstein and Washington’s (2001) study. Both studies point out specific pronunciation difficulties that Spanish-English bilingual children tend to