Development of Spanish rhotics in Spanish–English bilingual children in the United States

Abstract

Rhotics, particularly the trill, are late acquired sounds in Spanish. Reports of Spanish-English bilingual preschoolers document age-appropriate articulations, but studies do not explore productions once exposure to English increases. This paper reports on the rhotic productions of a cross-sectional sample of 31 Spanish-English bilingual children, ages 6;8 to 13;5. Children produced taps with high rates of accuracy across age groups; the trill did not reach 80% target production until age 11;3, later than reported for monolingual speakers. Increased English exposure is explored as a contributing factor, arguing a need for continued study of bilingual phonological development beyond the preschool years.

The missing link in Spanish heritage trill production

“…That is, if heritage speakers during late childhood or adolescence demonstrate target-like production of the trill and adult heritage speakers do not, this will be a case of delayed (complete) acquisition followed by attrition. Although this scenario seems less likely based on Menke's (2018) findings which demonstrated continued trill development of child heritage speakers between ages 6;8 and 13;5, we emphasize that meta-analysis should be taken with caution when done on studies that used different research methods (see Section 3.2). Thus, future research should consider the complete age spectrum, including early childhood, late childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, and late adulthood, and make comparisons using the same data elicitation and analysis methods to fully understand heritage Spanish trill development.…”

“…That is, the speakers in Carballo and Mendoza (2000) might have produced longer trills, because the task elicited more controlled speech than in our study. It is worth pointing out that the child heritage speakers in Menke (2018), who completed a similar task as in Carballo and Mendoza (2000) (i.e., picturesorting task), also demonstrated noticeably shorter durations (70.4 ms) than the monolingual children. Thus, the shorter segment duration found in our study compared to Carballo and Mendoza (2000) is likely to be a result of both fewer lingual constrictions and task type.…”

“…The number of occlusions of the phonetic trill variants, however, was consistent across the age groups (from 2.7 times in Grade 1 to 2.59 times in Grade 7). According to Menke (2018), this delay in development might be caused by the increase of exposure to English through interactions with school peers and teachers when child heritage speakers are still acquiring the trill.…”

“…Various studies on Spanish heritage speakers have found a prevalence of non-target-like realizations and high variability in the trill productions (e.g., fricative, approximant tap, approximant trill) by both children (Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein, 2010; Kehoe & Havy, 2018; Menke, 2018) and adults (Amengual, 2016; Henriksen, 2015; Kissling, 2018). For instance, Kehoe (2018) examined the speech of Spanish–German bilingual children in Germany longitudinally from 1;9 to 3;6 years and compared their rhotic development to that of Spanish and German monolingual children.…”

“…Note that while the monolinguals produced more target-like trills, their accuracy rate was still low, which indicates that Spanish speakers do not completely acquire this sound early on. Further examining heritage speakers’ trill development in childhood, Menke (2018) investigated the Spanish trill produced by school-aged child heritage speakers in the US between Grade 1 (6;8–7;6) and Grade 7 (12;8–13;5). Allophonic variants attested in monolingual data (i.e., phonetic trills, taps with frication, and assibilated trills) were considered target-like.…”