Speech Errors Produced By Bilingual Spanish-English Speaking Children and Monolingual English-Speaking Children With and Without Speech Sound Disorder

Purpose: Previous studies have shown that children with SSD speaking a language other than English produce different types of speech errors, although there is a paucity of information investigating these differences in speech sound production (e.g., Core & Scarpelli, 2015; Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein, 2010b; Fabiano-Smith & Hoffman, 2018). This study investigates the types of speech errors produced by bilingual Spanish-English and monolingual English-speaking children matched on age, receptive vocabulary, and articulation accuracy in single words.

Methods: Twelve bilingual English-Spanish speaking children, ages 4;0 to 6;11, were matched to twelve monolingual English-Speaking children. Participants completed standardized and non-standardized tests of speech and language, and performance between groups and assessment measures were compared. Consonant sound productions were categorized as correct, substitution errors, omission errors, or distortion errors.

Results: Bilingual Spanish-English children were significantly more likely than monolingual English children to produce omission errors, while monolingual English children were more likely to produce distortion errors. Both groups produced similar proportions of substitution errors. Bilingual children produced similar proportions of each error type in both of their languages.

Conclusion: SLPs should not rely on English normative data to diagnose SSDs in monolingual and bilingual Spanish-speaking children, as they demonstrate different errors patterns from monolingual English-speakers.