Maternal Cultural Orientation and Speech Sound Production in Spanish/English Dual Language Preschoolers

Simona Montanari,Kaveri Subrahmanyam,Robert Mayr

doi:10.3390/languages6020078

Abstract

Empirical work has shown that maternal education is related to children’s language outcomes, especially in the societal language, among Spanish-English bilingual children growing up in the U.S. However, no study thus far has assessed the links between maternal cultural orientation and children’s speech sound production. This paper explores whether mothers’ orientation to American (acculturation) and Mexican culture (enculturation) and overall linear acculturation are related to children’s accuracy of production of consonants, of different sound classes, and of phonemes shared and unshared between languages in both English and Spanish at age 4;6 (4 years and 6 months). The results reveal a link between maternal acculturation and children’s segmental accuracy in English, but no relation was found between mothers’ enculturation and children’s speech sound production in Spanish. We interpreted the results in English as suggesting that more American-oriented mothers may have been using more English with their children, boosting their English production abilities and promoting English speech sound development. At the same time, we speculate that the results in Spanish were possibly due to the high and homogeneous levels of Mexican orientation among mothers, to language input differences attributable to distinct cultural practices, or to the status of Spanish as a minority language.

Highlights

Considerable empirical work has demonstrated that maternal characteristics such as maternal education are strong predictors of language outcomes in young dual language learners
It is important to point out, that maternal acculturation was not related to all phonological measures in English
Regardless, while our findings demonstrate a relationship between the majority of children’s English segmental accuracy measures and maternal acculturation, we cannot ascertain why this pattern did not hold across the board, and it is possible that a combination of more than one factor came into play

Summary

Introduction

Considerable empirical work has demonstrated that maternal characteristics such as maternal education are strong predictors of language outcomes in young dual language learners. A large body of work has shown that maternal education is related to children’s phonological, lexical, and grammatical measures throughout development, especially in the societal language, among Spanish-English bilingual children growing up in the U.S (Bohman et al 2010; De Anda et al 2016; Friend et al 2017; Hammer et al 2012; Hoff et al 2018; Montanari et al 2020; Place and Hoff 2016). Place and Hoff (2016) documented positive correlations between maternal education and English comprehension, productive vocabulary, and, grammatical skills in Spanish-English bilingual children at 30 months of age. All mothers in Montanari et al (2020) were educated in Spanish in Mexico, and the language in which the mothers had received their education did not explain the differences in English speech and language outcomes between children of more and less educated mothers

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