Linguistically Informed Acoustic and Perceptual Analysis of Bilingual Children's Speech Productions: An Exploratory Study in the Jamaican Context

Abstract

Purpose: The aim of this study was to characterize speech acoustics in bilingual preschoolers who speak Jamaican Creole (JC) and English. We compared a standard approach with a culturally responsive approach for characterizing speech sound productions. Preschoolers' speech productions were compared to adult models from the same linguistic community as a means for providing confirmatory evidence of typical speech patterns specific to JC–English speakers. Method: Two protocols were applied to the data collected using the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology (DEAP) Articulation subtest: (a) the standardized DEAP protocol and (b) a culturally and linguistically adapted protocol reflective of the Jamaican post-Creole (English to Creole) continuum. The protocols were used to analyze responses from JC-English–speaking preschoolers ( n = 119) and adults ( n = 15). Responses were analyzed using acoustic (voice onset time, whole-word duration, and vowel duration) and perceptual (percentage of consonant correct–revised and response frequencies) measures. Results: The culturally responsive protocol captured variation in the frequency and acoustic differences produced in the post-Creole continuum, with higher amounts of “other” responses compared to “standard” target responses for both children and adults. Adults' whole-word durations were shorter and showed more consistent prevoicing during initial plosives compared to the children. Conclusions: Applying culturally responsive methods, including knowledge of the variation produced in the post-Creole continuum and with adult models from the same linguistic community, improved the ecological validity of speech characterizations for JC–English preschoolers. Acoustic properties of speech should be investigated further as a means of describing bilingual development and distinguishing between difference and disorder. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.20249382

Stop contrast acquisition in child Kriol: Evidence of stable transmission of phonology post Creole formation

“…The implementation of a constriction duration contrast word-medially further indicates that these stop contrasts have not been acquired through contact with the lexifier/L2 English in a formal educational setting: the Kriol children produce medial voiceless stops differing from voiceless stops in English, as VOT is the primary cue in English (see Table 2) while Kriol relies on constriction duration, perhaps even more so than VOT. This is consistent with the results reviewed for children acquiring non-Creole languages as well as French-lexified Haitian Creole (Archer et al, 2018) and English-lexified Jamaican Creole (León et al, 2022), which all demonstrate that children acquire the phonological inventory and the language specific phonetic realisations of these phonemes (including stop voicing) of their linguistic community/caregivers. The results also indicate that Kriol-acquiring children agree on the lexical specification of familiar Kriol words: there is no indication that the children individually determine a preferred lexical specification for each Kriol word presented.…”

“…The results presented here are thus generally consistent with what has been reported for children speaking Haitian Creole (Archer et al, 2018) and Jamaican Creole (León et al, 2022) as well as children acquiring non-Creole languages, and it is comforting in two ways. Firstly, such a scenario (of extreme variability in the phonological specifications of lexemes) would present challenges to children acquiring any language with similar levels of variation, beyond what children in multilingual and multidialectal societies experience, and perhaps be akin to what one might imagine in a perpetual situation of creolisationor perhaps more aptly by a perpetual situation of - by each successive generation of children.…”

“…Two recent studies of the acquisition of phonology, including stop voicing distinctions, by Creole-speaking childrenthe French-lexified Haitian Creole (Archer et al, 2018) and English-lexified Jamaican Creole (León et al, 2022) are particularly relevant to what we might expect from child Kriol-speakers in terms of production. These studies have both taken the (post-)Creole continuum and its associated variation as a theoretical given, yet the results from the studies indicate consistency in the production (and, we assume, also perception) of the children.…”

“…Archer et al (2018) indicate that young Haitian Creole-speaking children produce all but three (/ʧ ŋ ɲ/) Haitian Creole phonemes by the age of four, including voicing distinctions, in a manner that does not indicate the degrees of variation or idiosyncrasies predicted under a continuum model. León et al (2022) investigated differences between child and adult productions of Jamaican Creole phonemes in children aged 3;4-5;11 years and found that both child and adult participants produced voicing-based distinctions, but that the adults in general produced voiced stops with negative VOT, while children produced voiced stops with an average of just over 0 ms positive VOT. Developmental and other population differences in this study considered, these results indicate that child speakers are acquiring the language of their community, including a stable phonological system and stable lexemes.…”