Crosslinguistic Manifestations of Disordered Speech and Language

When languages come in contact with one another, they influence each other in systematic ways. Such contact is inevitable as typically developing children and children with speech sound disorders acquire more than one language. For example, in speaking English, a Spanish–English bilingual child might use monophthong vowels in the place of diphthongs given that the English vowel inventory includes diphthongs, but the Spanish vowel inventory does not.

This type of influence is distinct from expected simplification patterns in the productions of typically developing multilingual children and multilingual children with phonological disorders. Alison Holm and Barbara Dodd have termed this difference as an intralingual effect (which they describe as a more general process of bilingual language development) rather than an interference effect (specific to the two languages ...