Running head: A CRITICAL REVIEW OF AN EDITED ANTHOLOGY

A Critical Review of an Edited Anthology

Krista M. Boddy
Colorado State University

A CRITICAL REVIEW OF AN EDITED ANTHOLOGY

Abstract
The following review analyzes an edited anthology which focuses SLA research in regard to
monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual child language acquisition. The anthology especially
examines phonological development and language disorders in children. Some of the languages
examined in the anthology include English, German, Putonghua, Cantonese, Maltese, Telugu,
Colloquial Egyptian Arabic, Turkish, Spanish, Mirpuri/Punjabi/Urdu, Arabic, and Welsh. This
research is meant to be used by speech and language pathologists in aiding children with
phonological developmental disorders. The anthology recognizes four important concerns in
multilingual research. These include developmental universals, theoretical accounts of
phonological acquisition, bilingualism, and clinical populations. Each chapter of the anthology
describes research based on children from multiple language backgrounds and a variety of
language disorders. Such research is valuable in the field of SLA and can be useful for
addressing specific phonological disorders in English language learners.
Keywords: phonological development, phonological disorders, phonological acquisition,
Second Language Acquisition (SLA), bilingual, monolingual, multilingual

A CRITICAL REVIEW OF AN EDITED ANTHOLOGY

A Critical Review of an Edited Anthology
Selected Edited Anthology: Hua, Z. & Dodd, B. (Eds.). (2006). Phonological development and
disorders in children: A multilingual perspective. Clevedon, England: Multilingual
Matters LTD
Part I: Overview of purpose, content summary and divisions
The purpose of this anthology is to discuss research in SLA that makes comparisons
between monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual child language acquisition through the lens of
phonological development and language disorders in children. The languages examined in the
anthology include: English, German, Putonghua, Cantonese, Maltese, Telugu, Colloquial
Egyptian Arabic, Turkish, Spanish, Mirpuri/Punjabi/Urdu, Arabic, and Welsh. The results of
these studies are meant to be used by speech and language pathologists. The introduction
recognizes four important issues in multilingual research. These are developmental universals,
theoretical accounts of phonological acquisition, bilingualism, and clinical populations.
Developmental universals are features of language acquisition shared cross-linguistically. The
authors claim, The rate of acquisition of a particular phoneme or syllable component can be
different across languages, and the same phoneme may be associated with different error patterns
across languages (Hua & Dodd, 2006, p. 4). Theoretical accounts of phonological acquisition
involve markedness, biological and articulation constraints, and functional load (i.e., the
importance of individual phonemes within a phonological system). Bilingualism relates to
children who are given the challenge of learning two or more phonological systems. Clinical
populations refer to phonologically disabled children who have or have not been diagnosed with
speech and language disorders. This anthology consists of the four following parts: Introduction,
Monolingual Context, Bilingual Context, and Coda (Towards Developmental Universals).
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Part 2: Review of selections from monolingual context
Ch. 3 summary: Chapter three discusses English phonology specifically related to acquisition
and disorder. It explains that childrens speech sound development can be analyzed phonetically
and phonemically. The authors differentiate between the terms phonetic (i.e., sound production,
articulation, motor skills) and phonemic (i.e., functions, behavior, organization of speech) (p.
26). Some of the results scrutinized in the chapter reveal that variables such as age and gender
affect acquisition of particular phonemes. For example, one study by Smit et al. (1990) reported
a different age of acquisition for girls and boys for 11 sounds. The most striking gender
difference was reflected in the acquisition of the voiced dental fricative //: girls acquired the
sound by the age of 4;6 while boys were aged 7;0 (Hua & Dodd et al., 2006, p. 27). The studies
mentioned in the chapter all reach consensus on one fact. They prove that children tend to
acquire /m, n, p, b, w/ earlier than /, , z, , d, /, which are the final acquired sounds. The
study in this chapter assessed 684 monolingual British English-speaking children aged between
3;0 and 6;11. The three hypotheses include: Phonological skills will develop with age so older
children will have more accurate speech and fewer error patterns in their speech, Girls will
display higher levels of phonological accuracy than boys, and Children from higher socioeconomic families will have superior phonological skills than their peers from lower socioeconomic families (Hua & Dodd et al., 2006, p. 33-34). The articulation assessment involved
picture-naming to elicit all consonant sounds and almost all vowels. Some key results taken from
this study are as follows: speech impairment was 6.4%; of the kids with speech disability, 57.5%
had phonological delay, 12.5% had an articulation disorder, 20.6% had consistent phonological
disorder, and 9.4% had inconsistent phonological disorder. Age, gender, and socio-economic

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status varied. The authors conclude that delayed phonological development is the greatest
subgroup of speech disorder, and that articulation disorder occurred for 20% of these children.
Ch. 3 evaluation: I found the authors first hypothesis as obvious. The fact that older children
display fewer error patterns in their speech is apparent in how children develop phonological
skills. The conclusion of the other hypotheses relating to gender and socio-economic
backgrounds have many variables. I wish that the authors had stated more clearly their
conclusions related to their hypothesis specific to gender, rather than just stating there were
many variables. The authors did, however, relate there was a slight increase of speech disability
for affluent children, specifically in relation to articulation disorder and speech delay.
Ch. 4 summary: Chapter 4 examines evidence from two studies about child speech disorders in
German speakers. It is significant to note that, unlike English, German spelling and
pronunciation are closely related. The first study was applied to children who had no diagnosed
intellectual disorders, hearing impairments, or speech/language disorders. The subjects were 177
monolingual German speakers aged 1;6-5;11, who were assessed in their kindergartens or
homes. They were from a wide range of socio-economic status. The main assessment involved
picture-naming to elicit data of all German phonemes. The authors describe two criteria for
evaluating phoneme acquisition in the following quote, when 75% and 90% of children within
one age group were able to produce a phoneme at least two out of three times correctly in its
correct word position environment (Fox, 2006, p. 61). The results of this study revealed that
vowel errors were rare as they were developed early and consonant clusters were realized at age
3;0. It also showed that phonemic inventory of German-speaking children was acquired by ages
4;5-4;11. Interestingly, the replacement of /s/ and /z/ by // and // was found to be common in
German-speaking children, but rare in other languages assessed. Surprisingly, // and // are not
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German phonemes, revealing that this substitution is articulatory rather than a developmental
phonological process. The second study reviewed in this chapter dealt with 100 Germanspeaking children aged 2;7-7;7 who had been referred to German speech and language therapy.
The assessment involved a Single-Word Picture Naming Test and a 25-Word-Consistency-Test,
which had words with up to five syllables, consonant clusters, and known difficult words for
German-speakers to produce. Results of this study demonstrated 20% of subjects were classified
as having an articulatory disorder, especially in regards to the sounds /s/, /z/, /ts/ and //. 51%
were said to have delayed phonological development. 17% had consistent phonological disorder,
while 12% had inconsistent phonological disorder.
Ch. 4 evaluation: These two studies, using Dodds (2006) classification system, parallels the
English-speaking study mentioned above. In the study of SLA, it is beneficial to use one
classification system, because having a standard allows for more accurate comparisons crossculturally. One thing I liked about this study is how detailed the authors were in including how
they calculated the data and created their scoring scales.
Ch. 8 summary: This chapter surveys syllabic constraints in the phonological errors of children
with pre-lingual hearing loss in India. The chapter begins by providing a detailed overview of the
Telugu language, which has 60 million speakers and is the official language of the state of
Andhra Pradesh. Telugu consists of 43 phonemes, including 33 consonants, 10 vowels, and 2
diphthongs. Typical Teluga-speaking children, without disabilities, acquire almost all the major
vowels by age 1;6. Nasals tend to be produced next, followed by stops, laterals, affricates,
fricatives, and trills/flaps. Voiceless phonemes are acquired before voiced ones. The author next
discusses syllables and sonority (loudness) of a sound. Liquids and nasals are more sonorous
than affricates and fricatives, and voiced phonemes have greater sonority than unvoiced. The
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author relates that Teluga has a syllabic alphabet, meaning is contains vowels and consonants
with a neutral vowel. The main subjects of this study are hearing-impaired children and how
limited their phonological representations are. The chapter notes, A child who cannot articulate
speech sounds of a language being learned (as many hearing impaired children do), will,
necessarily, develop a phonology that is different in important ways from the adult model
(Vasanta, 2006, p. 193). The author claims that hearing impaired children learning a
phonological system must acquire the phonetic, phonemic, and phonotactic components. The
intention of this chapter is to investigate the results of a previous study of Teluga-speaking
hearing impaired children. The subjects examined are three hearing impaired Teluga children
aged 10-13 with developmental phonological disorder. The assessment involved 100 color
pictures of common objects such as fruit, body parts, and vehicles. The studys results revealed
the subjects had no significant phonetic abnormalities compared to normal hearing children. The
phonemic outcome indicated few vowel contrast errors and more accurate consonant production.
Phonological distinctions were tested separately through 100 minimal pairs in Telugu. The
children were also asked to read a popular Indian childrens story aloud. Recorded versions of
the story were examined for mistakes. One of the subjects who had greater hearing ability had
different phonological knowledge than the other subjects. The main conclusion made by the
author suggests that the hearing impaired subjects were greatly assisted by orthographic
awareness, lip-reading, and residual hearing.
Ch. 8 evaluation: The author of this study provides a great depth of background information
relating to the Teluga language. This is helpful to the reader in being able to understand the
nuances and challenges of learning that specific language. I like the studys focus on hearing
impairment related to phonological knowledge and its implications for treating children with

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these language disabilities. Though the study focuses on hearing impaired Indian children, its
implications for hearing impaired children in other languages is considerable.
Ch. 10 summary: This chapter analyses phonological acquisition and disorders in Turkish
children. It begins with a short history of speech and language therapy in Turkey. According to
the authors, this type of therapy is a recent phenomenon in Turkey. Next, the chapter explains
Turkish phonology including eight Turkish vowels (which are all short), syllable structure, and
stress (which usually falls on the last syllable of Turkish words). The authors summarize past
phonological studies of Turkish-speaking children with language disorders and children without
language disorders. In these previous studies, the data was not statistically computed, and the
sampling was too minimal to reflect accurate readings or norms. The study of focus involves 665
normally developing and 70 phonologically disordered children. The authors also collected
longitudinal data from 88 monolingual Turkish-speaking children aged 1;3-3;0 who had no
known language disabilities. A picture vocabulary test was used to assess the childrens language
usage. The test has three subsets that assess articulatory competence, auditory discrimination,
and phonological analysis. The findings for the phonologically disabled children reveal that error
patterns were unusual and inconsistent. The most common type of unusual errors were
stopping of liquids, stopping of nasals, gliding of fricatives, and nasalization of fricatives.
Inconsistent errors involve unintelligibility, glottalization, lateralization, and inconsistent use
of /h/ (Topbas & Yavas, 2006, p. 260). The authors conclude that speech accuracy increased
with the chronological age, and gender did not exert an influence on it (Topbas & Yavas, 2006,
p. 260). These findings match many cross-cultural studies of phonologically disabled children
from a multitude of language backgrounds.

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Ch. 10 evaluation: I found that the results of this study are duplicative of the study in chapter 3,
which examined English-speaking children with phonological disorders. The study in chapter 3
also found phonologically disabled children had unusual and inconsistent error patterns. The
results in which the authors concluded that speech accuracy increased with chronological age
were also proven correct in the hypothesis in chapter 3.
Part 3: Review of selections from bilingual context
Ch. 11 summary: The focus of this chapter relates to bilingual phonology in the case of
Spanish-English bilingual children. The authors note, Because bilingual children are acquiring
two phonological systems, it is likely that patterns of acquisition may be different from
monolinguals (Yavas, & Goldstein, 2006, p. 265). The authors go on to explain that sometimes
these differences observed could have to do with speech and language disorders, rather than
interference from the dominant languages influence. It is imperative that clinicians differentiate
whether a childs developmental patters are inconsistent from patterns found in monolingual
children, and whether the nonconforming patterns are due to the influence of the childs other
language(s), or if they are indications of a disorder (Yavas, & Goldstein, 2006, p. 265). The
authors relate one common example of interference for a six-year-old Spanish-English bilingual
child is [espik] for speak [spik], in which Spanish interference makes the child insert the [e]
before the consonant cluster of [sp]. Next, the chapter explains Spanish phonology, in that while
vowels are consistent, consonants have great variability. They use the example of //, which is
only used in certain dialects in Spain. Otherwise, the interdentals /, / are often substituted with
[t, d] initially (thank, those), and [s] finally (both, bathe). One significant difference between
Spanish and English phonology involves voiceless stops which are always unaspirated in
Spanish. For example, Spanish speakers, when speaking English, will not aspirate a stressed
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syllable in initial position (e.g., ton, pay, car). The authors relate that Spanish learners of English
will often replace [b] for /v/ (bowel-vowel), [s] for /z/ (sip-zip), and [t] for // (chop-shop).
Finally, they note that Spanish is a syllable-timed language (all syllables have equal duration),
whereas English is stressed-timed (stressed syllables are longer than unstressed syllables and
occur in regular intervals). The study in chapter 11 was meant to examine the development of
liquids (a later-developing sound) in English productions of Spanish-English bilingual children.
The participants included 15 normally developing bilingual (Spanish-English) children from 4;16;2 years of age. The assessment used was the Phonological Assessment of Latino Children
(Goldstein, 1999), which is a single-word phonology assessment to measure speech sound
productions. It has 26 target items for English and 29 target items for Spanish. The results of the
assessment revealed that childrens accuracy on liquids increased with age (73.3% in 4-yearolds, 88% in 5-year-olds, and 93.2% in 6-year-olds). Younger children (4-year-olds) showed
more variability than older ones (5-6-year-olds) with regard to accuracy of the // and /l/
phonemes. The authors summarize, Accuracy for // and /l/ may have been lower generally for
bilingual children because of their task of acquiring two phonological systems. In their attempt to
master sounds in two languages, the bilingual children may be focusing, unconsciously of
course, on earlier developing sound classes in both languages while not concentrating as much
on later developing sound classes (Yavas, & Goldstein, 2006, p. 281). Research related to this
study shows that bilingual children exhibit delay in acquiring later developing sounds of both
phonological systems. The authors communicate that there are few studies on bilingual children
with disorders and that developmental norms and assessment procedures for these individuals
need to be designed before such studies can occur.

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Ch. 11 evaluation: This study was enlightening in that it compares the phonological
development of two very different languages (Spanish-English), and how interference affects the
learning of both phonological systems. I feel this study was lacking in that it didnt analyze
bilinguals with language disabilities, as its focus was strictly on normally developing children.
At first glance, I felt that this chapter didnt fit into the overall theme of the anthology in that its
focus is not purely on language disabilities. I changed my mind due to the fact that two very
different phonological systems (Spanish-English) can cause developmental problems and
disorders in acquiring two or more languages.
Ch. 13 summary: This chapters focus is on phonological acquisition in bilingual Pakistani
children living in England. There are approximately 747,000 Pakistani heritage people living in
the UK, making it the second largest minority ethnic group in the country. The first study in this
chapter analyzed normally developing bilingual children of Pakistani heritage. The assessment
entailed ethnically appropriate drawings that elicited answers in the childs mother language. The
next studies dealt with clinically diagnosed language disorders in bilingual children. The first
case study comprised of a 6-year-old who grew up with Mirpuri (a Pakistani language) spoken at
home and English spoken in school. His expressive language in both languages was delayed. His
spontaneous speech was unintelligible, as his own family had difficulty understanding him. He
displayed unusual sound substitutions, which revealed a disordered phonological system. The
next case study involved a 3-year-old who was exposed to Punjabi from birth and English in
school. His comprehension and expression in Punjabi was delayed.
Ch. 13 evaluation: I feel the authors were lacking in their conclusions and overall discussion of
the results from the case studies. They emphasized data from normally developed bilingual
children, but omitted implications regarding the phonological disorders in the case studies.
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Ch. 14 summary: Chapter 14 investigates phonological development and disorder of bilingual
children acquiring both Welsh and English. The authors describe the Welsh language as coming
from the Celtic family of Indo-European languages, and explain its recent incline to 575,168
speakers. They then discuss the phonology of Welsh in comparison to English. To summarize,
Welsh has 13 monophthongs and 13 diphthongs, word stress typically on penult, and close
phoneme-grapheme correspondence. The next section explores the practice of speech therapy in
Wales and previous studies of the acquisition of Welsh phonology. The chapter next investigates
a study of normal phonological acquisition in bilingual children. The subjects, aged 2;6-5;0, had
a language background of both English and Welsh. Fifty words from both languages were
elicited by a picture assessment. Results examined three factors: age, sex, and language
dominance. A central characteristic regarding sex agreed with common discoveries in
sociolinguistic studies that females tend to use standard variants of phonological variables than
males, especially with regard to the plosive /t/ in English (Ball, Mller & Munro, 2006, p. 362).
A significant relationship to age showed that periods of increased variability are more likely in
the less dominant language in bilingual acquisition. Further, the fact that these periods are mainly
manifested for sounds in one language only, supports the notion that the children already have
separate phonologies for English and for Welsh (p. 363). With regard to language dominance,
The results show that dominance effects are mainly manifested on sounds within the velar,
fricative, trill, and approximant groups (p. 363). The next section of chapter 14 considers the
lack of bilingual studies specific to phonological disorders. The authors refer to a few case
studies, including an 8-year-old who had mild general learning difficulties, and had been
exposed to both Welsh and English from birth. His dominant language was English at the time of
the study. He was diagnosed with articulation impairment and inconsistent speech disorder,

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though his phonetic inventories for Welsh and English were similar. The second case study was
of a 5-year-old with slight delay in speech and language development, with his speech often
being unintelligible. He had above average intellectual ability in spite having no phonetic
inventory of /s/ and /z/ in either English or Welsh. The authors claim a next step for further
analysis would be to compare the data from the case studies with data from normally developing
bilingual children.
Ch. 14 evaluation: One aspect of this chapter that I appreciate, it the inclusion of treatment
information for the children involved in the case studies. I like how the authors provided more
detail about the types of therapy the children were given and the results of speech therapy. In one
case, the therapy was extensive and had positive results, whereas the other case studys parents
discontinued speech therapy.
Ch. 15 summary: This chapters emphasis was about phonological acquisition of ArabicEnglish bilingual children and adults. The author provided a brief overview of the chapter,
including how the chapter is different from the others in the anthology in the following ways:
this chapter focused on fewer subjects, older subjects (5,7,10, adults), and it provided aspects of
phonological acquisition related to phonemic contrasts, native-like acquisition, and
sociolinguistic competence. The author next presents background information to the study. This
includes research about the individual phonological systems of English and Arabic, and the
interactions of bilingual children in their environments relating to code-switching, grammatical
interference, and different phonological modes. The next section highlights some differences
between Arabic and English consonants, such as the /p/ not being represented in the Arabic
language and /l/ being used emphatically in all word positions in Arabic. The main study of
chapter 15 involves three bilingual Arabic-English children, three monolingual children from
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each language (all aged 5, 7, & 10) and the parents of the subjects. All subjects had no known
phonological disorders. The bilingual children came from Lebanese Arabic backgrounds and
used this language at home most frequently. Code-switching was a common practice of these
bilingual children and their parents. Assessments were done using picture-naming activities,
story-telling, and free-play. The next main section deals with how sociolinguistic factors (age,
dialect, style) relate to language acquisition in bilinguals. The author uses examples of /l/ and /r/
patterns. In English, the light /l/ is used in syllable-initial words (lip, blow), whereas the dark //
occurs often in syllable-final positions (peel, bulb). The results found that both monolingual and
bilingual groups produced few initial dark []s. In English /r/ is most often produced as a voiced
alveolar approximant [], while in Arabic, /r/ is produced as a tap or trill. The author relates,
The production of [] is known to involve physically complex articulations and usually emerges
late in childrens speech, commonly around the age of 4;5 in English and 5;6 in Arabic
(Khattab, 2006, p. 402). The last topic explored was the role of language mode. The bilinguals in
this study frequently utilized code-switching, often responding in English to Arabic questions
from their mothers.
Ch. 15 evaluation: The fact that this study included the parental language in the overall analysis,
made the results more effective in acknowledging the language input at home for the bilingual
children. The study of the parents language input provides insight into the bilingual childrens
phonological acquisition. The author concludes, Therefore, contrary to what is assumed in
many accounts of phonological learning, children do not only acquire the full inventory of adult
phonological oppositions, but may also preserve fine phonetic details of the speech input. This
allows them to imitate and reproduce speech patterns heard in their surrounding environment,
and therefore provides them with a huge benefit in acquiring the phonology of the local dialect

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from speakers they are exposed to early in life (Khattab, 2006, p. 409-410). It is important to
consider the various sources of language input that bilinguals absorb, as this input significantly
influences childrens phonological acquisition in both languages.
Part 4: Post-hoc evaluation of anthology
This anthology presents a diverse grouping of cross-cultural studies relating to
phonological development and language disorders. Some phonological similarities I noticed in
all the studies analyzed include: vowels are acquired before consonants in most languages,
phonemic acquisition of nasals (/m,n/) and plosives (/p, b, t, d, k, g/) are first sounds acquired in
all the languages represented in this anthology, unaspirated phonemes are acquired before
aspirated phonemes, all the children examined, regardless of first language, simplify syllable
structures, and children also reduce clusters across languages. I found part 3, which stresses
studies involving bilingual speakers, very complex. The research reveals that bilingual and
monolingual children differ greatly in their phonological development, in that bilinguals must
negotiate two divergent language systems. These children experience serious interference in their
acquisition of two languages. Finally, similarities across studies comparing normally developed
phonology with disordered phonology include: delayed error patterns, atypical error patterns, and
syllable preference. The subgrouping of speech disorders (articulation, phonological delay,
consistent phonological disorder, and inconsistent phonological disorder) are a helpful way to
categorize speech problems across languages. This anthology shares insightful evidence in the
study of phonological development and disorders in children, but it reveals massive holes in
research related to bilinguals with speech disorders. There is much more work to be done in this
small, but critical audience. Much more study is also needed in discovering how bilinguals
pedagogically negotiate between two completely different phonological systems.
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References
Hua, Z. & Dodd, B. (Eds.). (2006). Phonological development and disorders in children: A
multilingual perspective. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters LTD

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