Original music by Jonathan Huggins
Welcome to the third episode of the Language Meanderings podcast. My name is Jonathan. Today we’re going to look at some of my son’s pronunciation difficulties in Spanish. My son is 3 years old and was born in Mexico City. I speak to him in English and his mother speaks to him in French and Spanish and at his daycare and school, he speaks Spanish and French. Whenever I speak to him in English, he always answers me in Spanish, which is his primary language.
What are his main speaking and pronunciation difficulties at the moment? I’d say consonant clusters, intervocalic lenition, and stem changes.
So let’s take a listen to some of the examples for consonant clusters:
Consonant clusters – a group or sequence of two or more consonants. In my son’s case, in Spanish he has specific difficulty with r or l when it’s the last consonant of the cluster.
Some examples might be:
bravo, creer, dragón, francés, grande, problema, tratar
And his solution is to simply drop the r sound from the cluster. So here are some of his examples:
Tengo frío papá. Quiero un plátano pápa. No, uno muy grande. Uno, dos, que falta, tres, cuatro.
I’m cold Dad. I want a banana Dad. No, a very big one. One, two, what’s left, three, four.
Correct form – his pronunciation
frío – fío (cold)
frijoles – fijoles (beans)
plátano – piátano (banana)
grande – gande (big)
tres – tes (three)
cuatro – cuato (four)
Now another thing that he does is intervocalic lenition. So what is that?
Intervocalic means in between two vowels and lenition, from Latin lenis or weak, is when a consonant sound in this case, in between two vowels is weakened almost to the point of disappearing. You may recognize this from Cuban Spanish, when people say cu.ano with a very weak b sound.
So my son typically does this with intervocalic d and r
Eso es para mañana. Estoy cansado. …pues nada! Comimos todo el pastel. Bibi no se acabó todo. Mamá me puso yogurt, pero no [?] una cuchara.
This is for tomorrow. I’m tired. …well nothing! We ate all the cake. Bibi didn’t finish everything. Mom put yogurt, but she didn’t put a spoon [in my lunch bag].
Correct form – his pronunciation
todo – to.o (everything)
cansado – cansa.o (tired)
nada – na.da (nothing)
cuchara – cucha.ra (spoon)
para – pa.a (for)
And lastly, which is typical of most children with their first language, he has some difficulties with some irregular stems and conjugations for Spanish verbs. So, for example querer, which changes to quier- or saber, which in the first person is sé, and the verb poner for the past stem pus-. So, he does not integrate these changes to the stem and so here are some of the examples of what he says:
Papá, ya no quiero. Papá, Bibi quiere otro plátano.
Dad, I don’t want anymore. Dad, Bibi wants another banana.
querer – quier- (to want)
saber – sé (to know)
poner – pus- past stem (to put)
Correct form, his pronunciation
quiero – quelo
sé – sabo (I know)
puse – poní (I put)
To dig deeper into corrective exercises and speech therapy, I’m going to start researching bilingual speech language pathology, which according to an interview I watched on youtube is in growing demand across the U.S. due to the increasing population of English-learners and the majority of those learners have Spanish as their mother tongue. I recently contacted a bilingual speech therapist in Houston and I hope to be able to invite the doctor for an interview.
Thank you for listening and if you are a parent with a child who has some of these speech difficulty or changes in their pronunciation, I would be interested to hear some of your comments and I’m also really interested in finding out which languages seem to be the easiest for children to learn in terms of having correct pronunciation at a very early age, so I look forward to your comments.
If you would like English classes with me or would like to hear more about my language meanderings, please visit my site hugginsinternational.com or send me an email at hugginsinternational@gmail.com. Thanks for listening and I look forward to the next podcast.