The Case of the Zissors: Dialect or Disorder?

Abstract

Children who speak a non-mainstream form of English are at risk of being misidentified as having a speech sound disorder due to clinicians’ unfamiliarity with dialectal patterns. This study collected data on the speech productions of nine Spanish-English bilingual children ages seven to seventeen from Nogales, Arizona. This was done in order to document the presence of two suspected dialectal patterns for this region: /s/ /z/ and /tʃ/ /ʃ/. The /s/ /z/ pattern has not previously been documented in the literature. The other pattern, /tʃ/ /ʃ/, has been documented in sociolinguistic literature but it can be difficult for monolingual, English-speaking speech-language pathologists to access due to language constraints and limitations in the speech-language pathology literature. Single-word and connected speech samples were collected, along with a speaker perception task. Four of these children demonstrated the use of at least one of the dialectal patterns in single-words and five demonstrated the use of at least one of the patterns in connected speech. The judgment task did not function as expected, making the data uninterpretable. These results suggest that these patterns are present in children in Southern Arizona.