Phonological skills in Puerto Rican and Mexican Spanish-speaking children with phonological disorders

The effects of dialectal differences upon the speech production skills of children with phonological disorders are poorly understood. One might predict that the phonological profile of children using a radical dialect (e.g., Puerto Rican Spanish, which alters consonants in the syllable rhyme) will differ from that of children who use a conservative dialect (e.g., Mexican Spanish, which preserves such consonants). This study evaluated the impact of such dialectal differences by comparing the phonological skills of two groups of Spanish-speaking children with phonological disorders. Six participants used the Mexican dialect, the other six used the Puerto Rican dialect of North American Spanish. All children were matched on number of segmental errors and age, which ranged from 4;4 to 5;6 (M=4;10). A single-word assessment instrument was used to elicit data, and independent and relational analyses were completed for each child. Measures included phonetic inventory complexity, vowel accuracy, consonant accuracy, sound class accuracy, percentage-of-occurrence of phonological patterns, and frequency and types of substitutions. Significant between-group differences were not found for any measures. These findings do not support the hypothesis of significant phonological differences between phonologically disordered speakers of radical and conservative Spanish dialects.