Speech Production In Children Research Articles

A retrospective analysis of factors affecting speech production in school-aged children with cleft palate (+- cleft lip)

ObjectiveThe present investigation examined how factors such as cleft type, age of primary palatal surgery, diagnosed syndromes, hearing problems, and malocclusions could predict persistent speech difficulties and the need for speech services in school-aged children with cleft palate. MethodsParticipants included 100 school-aged children with cleft palate. Americleft speech protocol was used to assess the perceptual aspects of speech production. The logistic regression was performed to evaluate the impact of independent variables (IV) on the dependent variables (DV): intelligibility, posterior oral CSCs, audible nasal emission, hypernasality, anterior oral CSCs, and speech therapy required. ResultsSixty-five percent of the children were enrolled in (or had received) speech therapy. The logistic regression model shows a good fit to the data for the need for speech therapy (Hosmer and Lemeshow's χ2(8)=9.647,p=.291). No IVs were found to have a significant impact on the need for speech therapy. A diagnosed syndrome was associated with poorer intelligibility (Pulkstenis-Robinson's χ2(11)=7.120,p=.789). Children with diagnosed syndromes have about six times the odds of a higher hypernasality rating (Odds Ratio = 5.703) than others. The cleft type was significantly associated with audible nasal emission (Fisher’sexactp=.006). At the same time, malocclusion had a significant association with anterior oral CSCs (Fisher’sexactp=.005). ConclusionsAccording to the latest data in the Cleft Registry and Audit Network Annual Report for the UK, the majority of children with cleft palate attain typical speech by age five. However, it is crucial to delve into the factors that may influence the continuation of speech disorders beyond this age. This understanding is vital for formulating intervention strategies aimed at mitigating the long-term effects of speech disorders as individuals grow older.

Implementing recommended approaches to assessing multilingual children’s speech

Traditional approaches to assessing speech production are not appropriate for the diagnosis of speech sound disorders (SSD) in multilingual children. This study explored the implementation of recommended approaches to assessing the speech production of multilingual children in a French-speaking context. The speech production of 20 multilingual and 20 monolingual children aged 4-6 years was examined using a standardised naming task, parental ratings of intelligibility, and parental concern about speech development. We compared the diagnostic outcomes for monolingual and multilingual children using the norm-referenced approach and a criterion-referenced approach, based on percentage of consonant correct (PCC). We then examined the diagnostic outcomes for the 20 multilingual children using the recommended converging evidence approach (considering multiple measures). Results confirmed that the norm-referenced approach is not appropriate for French-speaking multilingual children, leading to an overdiagnosis of SSD. The converging evidence approach allowed for more informed and more nuanced diagnostic decisions for multilingual children.

Initial Stop Acquisition in Typically Developing Children Aged 1- to 2-Year-Olds

Objectives: This study investigated the articulatory characteristics of initial stops in the speech of 1-2-year-old children.Methods: A total of 35 typically developing children aged 1-2 years participated in the study. The participants performed a naming task using nine monosyllabic words containing initial stops. The accuracy of consonants in the initial stops, as well as errors in articulation position and voicing features were analyzed among children in the late 1-year-old and early 2-year-old age groups. Consonant accuracy, articulation position and voicing error ratios were compared between the two age groups. Additionally, the study investigated patterns of voicing errors observed in each age group in detail.Results: Findings revealed that the articulatory characteristics of initial stops were prominent in voicing errors observed in both age groups. Consonant accuracy was significantly higher in the early 2-year-old group compared to the late 1-year-old group. The most prevalent error observed in both late 1-year-old and early 2-year-old children was voicing errors. Examining the patterns of voicing errors, it was found that late 1-year-olds exhibited all possible error patterns in voicing features, while early 2-year-olds showed a reduction or disappearance of some voicing error patterns, excluding errors related to aspiration.Conclusion: This study investigated the articulatory characteristics of initial stops in the speech production of children in the late age of 1 and the early age of 2, presenting information on the acquisition process of initial stops. Error patterns in voicing features were commonly observed in the younger age group before the late age of 2.

Exposure to Canadian French Cued Speech Improves Consonant Articulation in Children With Cochlear Implants: Acoustic and Articulatory Data.

One of the strategies that can be used to support speech communication in deaf children is cued speech, a visual code in which manual gestures are used as additional phonological information to supplement the acoustic and labial speech information. Cued speech has been shown to improve speech perception and phonological skills. This exploratory study aims to assess whether and how cued speech reading proficiency may also have a beneficial effect on the acoustic and articulatory correlates of consonant production in children. Eight children with cochlear implants (from 5 to 11 years of age) and with different receptive proficiency in Canadian French Cued Speech (three children with low receptive proficiency vs. five children with high receptive proficiency) are compared to 10 children with typical hearing (from 4 to 11 years of age) on their production of stop and fricative consonants. Articulation was assessed with ultrasound measurements. The preliminary results reveal that cued speech proficiency seems to sustain the development of speech production in children with cochlear implants and to improve their articulatory gestures, particularly for the place contrast in stops as well as fricatives. This work highlights the importance of studying objective data and comparing acoustic and articulatory measurements to better characterize speech production in children.

Speech Outcomes of Frenectomy for Tongue-Tie Release: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

Tongue-tie, which is also known as ankyloglossia, is a common condition where the lingual frenulum is unusually tight or short. While most literature investigates the impact of tongue-tie on breastfeeding, recent articles have examined its role in speech production in children. However, these have not previously been reviewed systematically. This study aims to determine the impact of tongue-tie on speech outcomes and assess whether frenectomy can improve speech function. In this systematic review, we conducted a comprehensive search of PubMed/MEDLINE, Cochrane Library, Embase, and speechBITE to analyze primary studies investigating the impact of frenectomy for tongue-tie on speech outcomes. We extracted data regarding patient age, male to female ratio, procedure type, follow-up time, and speech outcomes and ran statistical analyses to determine if frenectomy for tongue-tie leads to improvement in speech issues in pediatric patients. Speech outcomes extracted were subjectively measured based on the interpretation of a speech and language pathologist or parent. Our analysis included 10 studies with an average patient age of 4.10 years, and average cohort size of 22.17 patients. Overall, frenectomy for tongue-tie was associated with an improvement in speech articulation (0.78; 95% CI: 0.64-0.87; P < .01). Increasing patient age was found to be negatively correlated with post-frenectomy speech outcomes (P = .01). However, this relationship disappeared in the adjusted model. Overall, we conclude that frenectomy is a suitable treatment to correct speech issues in select patients with tongue-tie if caught early in childhood. Despite the limited investigations around speech outcomes post-frenectomy, these results are informative to providers treating tongue-tie.

Effect of Phonological Awareness-Focused Interventions on Phonological Errors and Phonemic Awareness in Young School-Age Children.

This study aimed to explore the effects of an integrated phonological awareness intervention on phonological errors and phonemic awareness among young school-age children. Three children with at least one phonological error pattern and below-average phonological awareness skills participated in a non-concurrent multiple baseline single-subject design across participants' investigation. The integrated phonological awareness intervention consisted of completing blending and segmenting activities using 20 trained words, with a dose of 70 to 100 productions of the targeted phonological error pattern for 10, 30-minute sessions. All participants showed improvement in the primary dependent variable of percent consonants correct for their targeted error pattern for trained words. Results for percent phonemes correct showed gains for both blending and segmenting for all participants. All the participants transferred targeted skills to untrained words with their error pattern and generalized blending and segmenting to consonant-vowel-consonant words that did not contain their target error pattern in a pretest/posttest. Integrated phonological awareness intervention was an effective method of simultaneously improving speech production and phonemic awareness skills for young school-age children across 5 hours of treatment. The intervention was designed to be replicable by school-based speech-language pathologists seeking to efficiently support students with phonological errors and phonological awareness deficits.

Phonological acquisition in Vietnamese-speaking children with central dialect

ABSTRACT The current study investigated the phonological development in 3 to 7-year-old Vietnamese-speaking children with central dialect. Previous studies of speech development in Vietnamese-speaking children have focused on northern and southern dialects. The central Vietnamese dialect has distinct dialectal features. Therefore, it is essential to examine speech acquisition in children with central dialect to diagnose speech sound disorders accurately. Speech samples were collected from 80 children. Two native Vietnamese speakers transcribed children's speech productions independently using IPA symbols. The percentage of consonants correct, the percentage of initial consonants correct, the percentage of final consonants correct, the percentage of semivowels correct, and the percentage of vowels correct were calculated for age and sex groups. Ages of acquisition of individual consonants and phonological patterns were also identified. Overall, central Vietnamese-speaking children showed similar speech acquisition patterns compared to children with northern and southern Vietnamese dialects and other languages (e.g., vowels and semivowels were acquired early, and bilabials were acquired earlier than retroflex sounds). However, several differences from other dialects were also found in the age of acquisition for individual consonants (e.g., initial consonants /v/, /c/ and final consonants /k/, /ɲ/, /ŋ/). Central Vietnamese-speaking children produced initial /b/, /j/, /s/, /r/ and final /k/, /ŋ/ as dialectal variants for initial /p/, /z/, /ʂ/, /ʐ/ and final /t/, /n/, respectively. The current study's findings help us obtain a more comprehensive understanding of speech acquisition patterns in Vietnamese children and Vietnamese dialectal variants.

A psycholinguistics view on a child’s speech production in babbling stage: A case study

This study aims to examine a baby's babbling child's speech production seen from psycholinguistics view. It also aims to reveal the phonological organization, contextualize meaning, and decipher meaning of the baby’s babbling stage. The participant was an infant who was at the stage of babbling at eight months old. This study used case study as the research design. Moreover, the data was collected by using direct observation, document and parents’ interview. The results shows that there were 99 patterns in the baby’s babbling stage. Furthermore, the babbling topic occurred in several contexts, with each babbling having a varied meaning depending on the situation.

Assessing the speech production of multilingual children: A survey of speech-language therapists in French-speaking Belgium.

Assessing the speech production of multilingual children is challenging for speech-language therapists (SLTs) around the world. Scientific recommendations to improve clinical practice are available, but their implementation has mostly been described in studies from English-speaking countries. This survey aimed to describe the perspectives and practices of SLTs in assessing the speech production of multilingual children in French-speaking Belgium. An online survey was completed by 134 SLTs in French-speaking Belgium. SLTs predominantly used norm-referenced assessment approaches, which are not recommended for use with multilingual children, and lacked necessary training and resources to implement recommended practices in the assessment of speech production of multilingual children. The shift towards more appropriate practices with multilingual children seems to be in its infancy among SLTs in French-speaking Belgium. Some challenges identified by the SLTs were common to those in other countries and languages, such as the difficulty to distinguish between speech differences and speech disorders. Other challenges were specific to the French language and/or the Belgian context, such as the lack of appropriate tools in French. Action is required to improve clinical practice in assessing the speech production of multilingual children in French-speaking contexts: better training for SLTs regarding linguistic diversity, more implementation research in the field of SLT, and advocacy for linguistic diversity with decision makers. What is already known on this subject Existing research indicates that assessing the speech production of multilingual children is challenging for speech-language therapists (SLTs). Scientific recommendations for best practices have been published, and the shift to more appropriate assessment practices may be progressing differently across countries. SLTs' practices have been described in surveys, mostly conducted in English-speaking countries. Although French is the fifth most spoken language in the world, data about SLTs' perspectives and practices in French-speaking regions are scarce. What this study adds The implementation of recommended practices in assessing multilingual children's speech production was limited among SLTs in French-speaking Belgium. The norm-referenced approach to assessment was predominant and few SLTs used recommended practices (e.g., criterion-referenced measures, dynamic assessment, assessment of the child's speech production in the home language). Some challenges were identified that related specifically to practices in French-speaking contexts (e.g., lack of French tools) and Belgian context (e.g., health policies unfavourable to multilingualism). These findings confirm that specific understanding of a situation is needed to develop context- and/or language-specific solutions-and ultimately improve clinical practice. What are the clinical implications of this work? SLTs in French-speaking Belgium require specific training and support to provide appropriate assessment of speech production in multilingual children. Efforts to improve practices in French-speaking contexts should focus on increasing understanding and consideration of cultural and linguistic diversity at all levels of the child's environment. Evidence-based knowledge, assessment tools and multilingual resources are available to SLTs on websites in French and in English.

The Relationship Between Speech Perception, Speech Production, and Vocabulary Abilities in Children: Insights From By-Group and Continuous Analyses.

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between speech perception, speech production, and vocabulary abilities in children with and without speech sound disorders (SSDs), analyzing the data both by group and continuously. Sixty-one Australian English-speaking children aged 48-69 months participated in this study. Children's speech production abilities ranged along the continuum from SSDs through to typical speech. Their vocabulary abilities ranged along the continuum from typical to above average ("lexically precocious"). Children completed routine speech and language assessments in addition to an experimental Australian English lexical and phonetic judgment task. When analyzing data by group, there was no significant difference between the speech perception ability of children with SSDs and that of children without SSDs. Children with above-average vocabularies had significantly better speech perception ability than children with average vocabularies. When analyzing data continuously, speech production and vocabulary were both significant positive predictors of variance in speech perception ability, both individually in simple linear regression and when combined in multiple linear regression. There was also a significant positive correlation between perception and production of two of the four target phonemes tested (i.e., /k/ and /ʃ/) among children in the SSD group. Results from this study provide further insight into the complex relationship between speech perception, speech production, and vocabulary abilities in children. While there is a clinical and important need for categorical distinctions between SSDs and typically developing speech, findings further highlight the value of investigating speech production and vocabulary abilities continuously and categorically. By capturing the heterogeneity among children's speech production and vocabulary abilities, we can advance our understanding of SSDs in children. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.22229674.

Developing the Little Kids’ Word List app, a fair assessment tool of communicative development for young Aboriginal children in multilingual families in Central Australia

Assessment of the language development of Aboriginal children in Central Australia is a major challenge, because little is known about the children’s language repertoires and paths of development. The Central Australian language context presents a specific challenge for describing what young children are learning and for developing an appropriate vocabulary assessment tool. National Indigenous policies now have a focus on young children’s development, and existing monolingual English language assessment tools are bound to be inaccurate and unfair, either under-reporting knowledge that is present, or under-reporting difficulties children may have. In response, a multilingual ‘spoken’ MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) app, the Little Kids' Word List, has been developed for four of the languages spoken by young children in Central Australia: Eastern &amp; Central Arrernte, Western Arrarnta, Warlpiri and English, and another two languages are being added. The Little Kids’ Word List app has been intentionally designed for fairer language assessments of the speech production and comprehension of young Indigenous children in Central Australia. The development processes explored the complex linguistic contexts, multilingual repertoires and cultural practices of the children’s families. This is reflected in the content and design of the app, making it appropriate for these young Aboriginal children developing their languages knowledge. In contrast to a monolingual English-based tool developed in different cultural settings, the Little Kids’ Word List app can make visible the Central Australian cohort's languages strengths and knowledge base.

Análise semântica de palavras do Instrumento Virtual de Avaliação da Fala

ABSTRACT Purpose: to carry out the semantic analysis of a list of words that will compose a virtual tool for speech assessment for children and adolescents. Methods: twenty-three participants, aged between 2 years old and 17 years and 11 months old, from the central region of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, assigned the concept of 91 words. Data analysis was performed quantitatively, considering the concept of each word as correct or incorrect. Content Validity Ratio (RVC) and Gwet’s first-order agreement coefficient (AC1) statistical calculation were calculated. Results: from the word list analyzed, 42 stimuli presented CVR = 1; 30 words obtained CVR = 0.9; 11 with CVR = 0.8; six with CVR = 0.7; two had CVR = 0.4. Gwet's AC1 statistical calculation resulted in AC1 = 0.92 [CI = 0.90 - 0.94] for semantic analysis. Conclusion: the list consisted of 91 semantically validated words that can be used to assess the speech production of children and adolescents.

A Descriptive Study of Speech Breathing in Children With Cerebral Palsy During Two Types of Connected Speech Tasks.

This study examined speech breathing during two connected speech tasks in children with cerebral palsy (CP) and typically developing (TD) peers. Understanding how the respiratory system supports speech production during various speech tasks can help researchers construct appropriate models of speech production and clinicians remediate speech disorders effectively. Four children with CP and four age- and sex-matched TD peers completed two speech tasks, reading and extemporaneous speech. Respiratory kinematic and acoustic data were collected. Dependent variables included utterance length, speech rate, sound pressure level, and lung volume variables. Based on descriptive results, children with CP and speech motor involvement demonstrated reduced utterance length and speech rate, equivalent intensity levels, and changes in lung volume variables indicative of respiratory physiological impairment as compared to their TD peers. However, children with CP and no speech motor involvement exhibited speech production and speech breathing variables in the more typical range. In relation to task effects, the majority of children (CP and TD) produced shorter utterances, slower speech rates, equivalent intensity levels, higher lung volume initiation, termination, excursion, higher percent vital capacity per syllable, and longer inspiratory duration during extemporaneous speech as compared to reading. Two major themes emerged from the data: (a) Children with CP, particularly those with concomitant speech motor involvement, demonstrate different speech production and speech breathing patterns than their TD peers. (b) Speech task impacts speech production and speech breathing variables in both children with CP and their TD peers, but the extemporaneous speech task did not seem to exaggerate group differences.

Say that again: Quantifying patterns of production for children with autism using recurrence analysis.

The current research study characterized syntactic productivity across a range of 5-year-old children with autism and explored the degree to which this productivity was associated with standardized measures of language and autism symptomatology. Natural language samples were transcribed from play-based interactions between a clinician and participants with an autism diagnosis. Speech samples were parsed for grammatical morphemes and were used to generate measures of MLU and total number of utterances. We applied categorical recurrence quantification analysis, a technique used to quantify patterns of repetition in behaviors, to the children's noun-related and verb-related speech. Recurrence metrics captured the degree to which children repeated specific lexical/grammatical units (i.e., recurrence rate) and the degree to which children repeated combinations of lexical/grammatical units (i.e., percent determinism). Findings indicated that beyond capturing patterns shown in traditional linguistic analysis, recurrence can reveal differences in the speech productions of children with autism spectrum disorder at the lexical and grammatical levels. We also found that the degree of repeating noun-related units and grammatical units was related to MLU and ADOS Severity Score, while the degree of repeating unit combinations (e.g., saying "the big fluffy dog" or the determiner-adjective-adjective-noun construction multiple times), in general, was only related to MLU.

Speech Perception Variability in Childhood Apraxia of Speech: Implications for Assessment and Intervention.

Beyond hallmark production deficits characterizing childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), largely attributed to disruption(s) in speech motor planning, children with CAS often present with co-occurring speech perception and language difficulties. Thus, careful consideration of the potential for speech perception difficulties to have cascading downstream effects on intervention responsiveness and real-life functioning for some children with CAS is highly important. The purpose of this tutorial was to consider the impact of speech perception abilities in children with CAS, which carries implications for caring for the needs of the whole child. This tutorial summarizes the current literature on speech perception and how it relates to speech production, language, and reading abilities for children with CAS. We include case illustrations that are adapted from real clinical scenarios illustrating how speech perception difficulties may impact some children with CAS and provide recommendations for incorporating speech perception into assessment and intervention practices. Although speech perception difficulties do not seem to be a core deficit of CAS, they are strongly linked to language difficulties, which are highly prevalent among children with CAS. Speech perception and language difficulties are also associated with reading difficulties and risk for lower academic achievement. Children with CAS who have co-occurring language difficulties likely also demonstrate speech perception deficits, which puts them at heightened risk for reading difficulties and struggles with academic achievement. Comprehensive assessment of children with CAS should address speech perception and production, language, and reading abilities, which carries important implications for multifaceted approaches to intervention.

LANGUAGE EXPOSURE PREDICTS CHILDREN'S PHONETIC PATTERNING: EVIDENCE FROM LANGUAGE SHIFT.

Although understanding the role of the environment is central to language acquisition theory, rarely has this been studied for children's phonetic development, and receptive and expressive language experiences in the environment are not distinguished. This last distinction may be crucial for child speech production in particular, because production requires coordination of low-level speech-motor planning with high-level linguistic knowledge. In this study, the role of the environment is evaluated in a novel way-by studying phonetic development in a bilingual community undergoing rapid language shift. This sociolinguistic context provides a naturalistic gradient of the amount of children's exposure to two languages and the ratio of expressive to receptive experiences. A large-scale child language corpus encompassing over 500 hours of naturalistic South Bolivian Quechua and Spanish speech was efficiently annotated for children's and their caregivers' bilingual language use. These estimates were correlated with children's patterns in a series of speech production tasks. The role of the environment varied by outcome: children's expressive language experience best predicted their performance on a coarticulation-morphology measure, while their receptive experience predicted performance on a lower-level measure of vowel variability. Overall these bilingual exposure effects suggest a pathway for children's role in language change whereby language shift can result in different learning outcomes within a single speech community. Appropriate ways to model language exposure in development are discussed.

Designedly incomplete utterances as prompts for co-narration in home literacy events with young multilingual children

This video-ethnographic study investigates how designedly incomplete utterances (DIUs) are used during home literacy events in three multilingual families with young children in Sweden to prompt collaborative storybook reading in the children's heritage language, Russian. The multimodal interaction analyses uncover how DIUs, in concert with other semiotic resources, create a sequential environment to prompt children's speech production in relation to the text at hand, negotiate language choice and alignment with an ongoing literacy project, and to creatively exploit the DIU structure to initiate storytelling. The findings moreover show that recurrent use of DIUs during the reading of well-known to the child texts with rhythm and rhyme allows for ritualized engagement in co-narration, in all contributing to children's socialization to oral performance in the heritage language.

Subsegmental representation in child speech production: structured variability of stop consonant voice onset time in American English and Cantonese.

Voice onset time (VOT) of aspirated stop consonants is marked by variability and systematicity in adult speech production. The present study investigated variability and systematicity of voiceless aspirated stop VOT from 161 two- to five-year-old talkers of American English and Cantonese. Overall, many aspects of child VOT productions parallel adult patterns, the analysis of which can help inform our understanding of early speech production. For instance, VOT means were comparable between children and adults, despite greater variability. Further, across children in both languages, talker-specific VOT means were strongly correlated between [th] and [kh]. This correlation may reflect a constraint of "target uniformity" that minimizes variation in the phonetic realization of a shared distinctive feature. Therefore findings suggest that target uniformity is not merely a product of a mature grammar, but may instead shape speech production representations in children as young as two years of age.

Intersensory matching of faces and voices in infancy predicts language outcomes in young children.

Parent language input is a well-established predictor of child language development. Multisensory attention skills (MASks; intersensory matching, shifting and sustaining attention to audiovisual speech) are also known to be foundations for language development. However, due to a lack of appropriate measures, individual differences in these skills have received little research focus. A newly established measure, the Multisensory Attention Assessment Protocol (MAAP), allows researchers to examine predictive relations between early MASks and later outcomes. We hypothesized that, along with parent language input, multisensory attention to social events (faces and voices) in infancy would predict later language outcomes. We collected data from 97 children (predominantly White and Hispanic, 48 males) participating in an ongoing longitudinal study assessing 12-, 18-, and 24-month MASks (MAAP) and parent language input (quality, quantity), and 18- and 24-month language outcomes (child speech production, vocabulary size). Results revealed 12-month intersensory matching (but not maintaining or shifting attention) of faces and voices in the presence of a distractor was a strong predictor of language. It predicted a variety of 18- and 24-month child language outcomes (expressive vocabulary, child speech production), even when holding traditional predictors constant: parent language input and SES (maternal education: 52% bachelor's degree or higher). Further, at each age, parent language input predicted just one outcome, expressive vocabulary, and SES predicted child speech production. These novel findings reveal infant intersensory matching of faces and voices in the presence of a distractor can predict which children might benefit most from parent language input and show better language outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Linguistically Informed Acoustic and Perceptual Analysis of Bilingual Children's Speech Productions: An Exploratory Study in the Jamaican Context.

The aim of this study was to characterize speech acoustics in bilingual preschoolers who speak Jamaican Creole (JC) and English. We compared a standard approach with a culturally responsive approach for characterizing speech sound productions. Preschoolers' speech productions were compared to adult models from the same linguistic community as a means for providing confirmatory evidence of typical speech patterns specific to JC-English speakers. Two protocols were applied to the data collected using the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology (DEAP) Articulation subtest: (a) the standardized DEAP protocol and (b) a culturally and linguistically adapted protocol reflective of the Jamaican post-Creole (English to Creole) continuum. The protocols were used to analyze responses from JC-English-speaking preschoolers (n = 119) and adults (n = 15). Responses were analyzed using acoustic (voice onset time, whole-word duration, and vowel duration) and perceptual (percentage of consonant correct-revised and response frequencies) measures. The culturally responsive protocol captured variation in the frequency and acoustic differences produced in the post-Creole continuum, with higher amounts of "other" responses compared to "standard" target responses for both children and adults. Adults' whole-word durations were shorter and showed more consistent prevoicing during initial plosives compared to the children. Applying culturally responsive methods, including knowledge of the variation produced in the post-Creole continuum and with adult models from the same linguistic community, improved the ecological validity of speech characterizations for JC-English preschoolers. Acoustic properties of speech should be investigated further as a means of describing bilingual development and distinguishing between difference and disorder. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.20249382.