Influence of current input-output and age of first exposure on phonological acquisition in early bilingual Spanish-English-speaking kindergarteners.

Background: Although some investigations of phonological development have found that segmental accuracy is comparable in monolingual children and their bilingual peers, there is evidence that language use affects segmental accuracy in both languages.

Aims: To investigate the influence of age of first exposure to English and the amount of current input-output on phonological accuracy in English and Spanish in early bilingual Spanish-English kindergarteners. Also whether parent and teacher ratings of the children's intelligibility are correlated with phonological accuracy and the amount of experience with each language.

The relationship of phonological skills to language skills in Spanish-English-speaking bilingual children.

These two studies investigate the relationship between phonological production skills and performance in other domains of language in Spanish-English-speaking bilingual children. We examine the relationship between scores on a single-word phonology test and language measures selected from formal testing and narrative samples in Spanish and English. The first study explores the language and phonology scores of 186 children (mean age = 5 years, 9 months) who represent a range of language ability levels.