Summary
In the United States, many young, emerging Spanish-English bilingual children only have
access to Spanish in their home environment, and of these, nearly 10% are expected to have
speech sound disorder (SSD), a high-incidence disability negatively impacting their language,
academic, social, and occupational outcomes. Early treatment of SSD for these young bilingual
children requires treatment in their first language, which is known to support development of
both Spanish and English as they develop bilingually. However, the evidence base to support
efficient treatment in Spanish for bilingual children currently does not exist, despite the
availability of evidence-based options for monolingual English-speaking children. This is an
unacceptable gap in the literature amounting to a significant health disparity between
monolingual and bilingual children. To address this disparity directly, we attend to the initial step
in treatment of SSD—selection of the speech sounds trained during treatment sessions.
Evidence from monolinguals has shown that complex targets result in faster learning of sounds
beyond the trained target. Drawing from this evidence, we examine the complexity of consonant
clusters (e.g., /fl/ in flan or /b¿/ in brinca) in the Spanish productions of typically developing
bilingual children to determine which are phonetically and phonologically most complex. We
also evaluate an outcome-based, hypothesis-driven intervention to determine if consonant
cluster stimuli (e.g., /fl/ in flan) result in different treatment outcomes than singleton consonant
stimuli (e.g., /l/ in lindo) in emerging bilinguals with SSD. With this project we seek to reduce the
health disparity between bilingual and monolingual children by offering empirical data to support
efficacious treatment target selection in Spanish-speaking bilingual children.
This proposal contains training components in the skills and experience necessary to excel as
an independent research scientist conducting investigations with direct clinical impact on health
disparities affecting Spanish-English bilingual children. Training will take place at San Diego
State University under the mentorship and supervision of university faculty and a local speech-
language pathologist.