Typical Development of Speech in Spanish in Comparison to English

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Reprinted with the express permission of Bilinguistics as originally published on their website.

By: Bilinguistics, Inc.
The mission at Bilinguistics is "to enhance the communication of Spanish-English bilingual children, enabling those children to achieve their highest communicative and academic potential. Additionally to support monolingual and bilingual professionals working with bilingual children and English language learners through workshops, presentations, and continuing education.


This is a Continuing Education Course offered by Bilinguistics, an ASHA Approved CE Provider. To take the test and receive Continuing Education Units for this course, please visit the Bilinguistics website test page for this course HERE

• Content Area: Basic Communication Processes
• Instructional Level: Introductory
• Continuing Education Units: .1 (1 hour)
  

Objectives:
Participants will be able to demonstrate knowledge in and identify:

• Basic acquisition of speech sounds at the linguistic level
• Speech patterns in English and Spanish that are shared or are different
• Phonological processes of Spanish and English
• Differences between Spanish and English in the acquisition and use of vowels
• Differences between Spanish and English in the acquisition and use of consonants
• Differences in syllable type employed by both languages
  

Introduction
The population of Spanish speakers worldwide is approximately 322 million (Encarta, 2004). In the United States alone, 10% (35 million) of the population is Hispanic and this number is projected to double by 2030 (United States Census, 2000). These demographic changes have increased the possibility that an interventionist or researcher will come into contact with Spanish and Spanish-speaking cultures. This becomes problematic when "most speech-language pathologists are not Spanish speakers, [and] may not be sufficiently aware of the important phonological differences [of] Spanish (Goldstein & Iglesias, 82; 1996)." The international and domestic research communities have responded with a plethora of information concerning Spanish developmental tendencies.

The purpose of this paper is to present this data to assist both monolingual and Spanish-speaking bilingual speech-language pathologists in identifying the differences between Spanish and English speech acquisition. This information is important in differentiating disordered speech from and typical speech acquisition processes. The content of this paper has been organized to be easily accessible for both Spanish speakers and non-Spanish speakers alike. As most professionals are most familiar with typical development of speech in English, this paper presents Spanish speech development as compared to English. The information is also divided into basic speech topics (phonology, vowels, consonants, and syllable structure) in order to be easily digested.

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This is a Continuing Education Course offered by Bilinguistics, an ASHA Approved CE Provider. To take the test and receive Continuing Education Units for this course, please visit the Bilinguistics website test page for this course HERE



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The mission at Bilinguistics is "to enhance the communication of Spanish-English bilingual children, enabling those children to achieve their highest communicative and academic potential. Additionally to support monolingual and bilingual professionals working with bilingual children and English language learners through workshops, presentations, and continuing education."

For more information about this organization please visit Bilinguistics