The Development of a Word List for a Mexican Spanish Phonological Assessment

Abstract

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) encounter many Spanish-speaking children in their caseload; however, there exist few phonological assessments to date that can accurately assess the phonological capabilities of bilingual children. Because of the lack of assessments, many Spanish-English bilingual children are diagnosed with speech sound disorders when in fact they are typically-developing. Many children are misdiagnosed because the phonological features of their dialect of Spanish are not taken into account. The purpose of this study was to develop a word list for a phonological assessment of Mexican Spanish. This assessment will account for the dialect's unique phonological features that may otherwise be considered signals of speech sound disorders if SLPs are not aware of them. The literature was reviewed to develop a list of criteria essential to the development of a word list for an English phonological assessment, then the criteria was applied to the formation of a word list for a Spanish assessment. After considering the criteria, a word list was created in which all consonant phonemes of Mexican Spanish were included. Correlations were performed to examine the relationship between the test items and the frequency of occurrence of consonant phonemes in the Spanish language to provide a measure of validity.