Emerging English Plural in Young Spanish-English Bilinguals

Abstract

In Spanish and English, grammatical information is added to regularly inflected nouns and verbs through -s suffixes. Spanish marks plural with [s], whereas English plural surfaces as [s] or as [z], a sound not included in Spanish word-final phonology. Thus, English plural marking in [z] contexts may emerge differently for Spanish-English (SE) bilinguals. The current study addressed the potential for the phonemic inventory mismatch between the two languages to account for the presence of an English grammatical morpheme in obligatory [z] contexts. Data from 12 SE bilinguals ( M age = 5;0) were analyzed to determine whether word-final Spanish and English [s] or word-final English [z] was predictive of the English plural morpheme. Children produced word-final [s] across both languages with over 80% accuracy and English word-final [z] with 33% accuracy. Chi-square tests indicated that English plural was not associated with production of either word-final [s] or [z]. Several children marked English plurals despite not accurately producing word-final [z] in nonmorphemic contexts. Clinicians should probe word-final [s] and [z] phonology prior to assessing morphology and consider phonemic inventory differences between a child's languages.