Rethinking assessment measures of phonological development and their application in bilingual acquisition

This article discusses the measurements for phonological and prosodic development put forward in Ingram [Ingram, D. (2002). The measurement of whole-word productions. Journal of Child Language, 29, 713-733.], while at the same time expanding the crucial measures, phonological mean length of utterance (PMLU) and proportion of whole-word proximity (PWP). The goal of the expansion is to accommodate a wider set of phenomena, specifically those related to bilingual acquisition of languages with different categories (e.g. closed syllables in German and open syllables in Spanish). Data from three monolingual Spanish children and from three bilingual German--Spanish children are presented as illustration of the modified measurements: expanded PMLU of features (ePMLU-F), expanded PMLU of syllables (ePMLU-S) and expanded PWP (ePWP). By means of measuring both features and prosodic positions, the expanded measurements do better justice to the various aspects of child phonology. Nonetheless, an important goal of this article is to stimulate discussion in order to bring our state-of-the-art closer to descriptive adequacy.