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Research on the phonological development of bilingual Spanish-English-speaking and monolingual English-speaking children has revealed that bilingual children may demonstrate differences in their English phonology during development due to transfer, or the application of rules from one language to the other (Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein, 2010). However, there is limited research on differences in phonological production for vocabulary acquired during the school-age years, particularly when most content is presented in English. We hypothesized that bilingual children would produce more errors on the consonants at the end of syllables (i.e., codas) legal in English only than those legal in both languages due to differences in the phonotactics of Spanish and English. We used data from an English-like nonword learning task to analyze differences in productions. Forty-three bilingual Spanish-English-speaking children ages 7-9 were matched with monolingual English-speaking peers for age, sex, mother's level of education, and Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation (GFTA-2) percentile scores. Results support the hypothesis, suggesting that phonological transfer may occur during the configuration state of word learning. This work was supported by National Institutes of Health NIDCD (R01 DC010784). |
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