A Case of a Multilingual Child with Misarticulation in One Language : Challenges in the Assessment and Therapy of Articulation in Japanese and English

Abstract

The number of multilingual speakers living in Japan has increased in recent decades, and speech therapists today are therefore increasingly likely to conduct speech-language evaluation and therapy in two or more languages. Here we present a bilingual child with misarticulation only found when speaking English. The boy, aged three years and eleven months, came to our outpatient clinic with no medical record of developmental problems besides his speech sound errors. After examination of his speech structures and functions by an otorhinolaryngologist, we performed two tests of articulation, Kouon Kensa in Japanese and Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation 2 in English, and undertook informal assessment of the child’s receptive and expressive language, hearing, and oral mechanism. Perceptual analysis revealed correct sound productions except for a consistent error (omission) in consonant clusters in English, such as [pun] for “spoon”/spun/. We conducted a trial therapy in which oral airflow (/s/-like gesture) followed by an articulatory closure for /p/ and /t/ was successfully imitated. A daily home program was provided and performed for three months. The follow-up evaluation showed that the consonant clusters were correctly produced in the test of articulation and in conversational speech. Consonant clusters are the most common class of misarticulation among English-speaking children. When a speech therapist conducts evaluation of a multilingual speaker or a non-Japanese-speaking person, it is necessary to prepare tools and tasks corresponding to the patient’s language or languages. An auditory-perceptual analysis of speech may be assisted by the family members. Understanding the phonemic and phonetic characteristics of a language appears to be essential for proper assessment of articulation.