Puerto Rican vs. Mexican Spanish

This will probably be a semi-short post but I wanted to take a second and comment on something interesting I have been looking into the past week; that is, the importance of identifying the home dialect of any non-English speaking clients. You know it's important to identify whether the child is bilingual, but in the case of many languages, dialects MATTER!

An example: I recently started seeing a new 4-year old friend in Spanish who had goals written for plurals. In informal conversation and play, I noticed final /s/ omissions and some gliding (/l/ for /r/), as well. Ironically, in some instances she used the plural form appropriately and in others did not. After speaking with her mother, I noticed that the mother was also not only deleting final /s/ in some instances but was demonstrating other atypical sound substitutions, like /l/ for /r/.

Hold on a second here. "Where is your family from originally?" I asked. "Puerto Rico."

Ah HA!

Okay people. Here's the thing. Phonemic inventories and sound patterns can and do often vary across dialects. After going home and doing a little research and digging into my old linguistics textbooks, I realized that this child probably doesn't need a goal for plurals (but I will give a receptive ID test to check for comprehension). She is just a speaker of Puero Rican Spanish. I don't see many of these on my caseloads, as most of my kiddos speak the Mexican dialect.

Here are some helpful sound distinctions of Puerto Rican Spanish to be aware of:

Although this rang a bell for me from undergrad I definitely needed a refresher! What kinds of dialectical variations of Spanish are you finding on your caseload?