Chapter 11. Dynamic assessment in phonology

Dynamic assessment (DA) is an approach strongly recommended for bilingual children since it measures children’s learning capacities and not their static knowledge. It has been widely applied to the assessment of children’s lexical, morphosyntactic, and narrative abilities but minimally so to children’s phonological abilities; however, its application to phonology has existed for many years in the form of stimulability testing. This chapter reviews the notion of stimulability and how it has been integrated into DA approaches to phonological production, primarily in English. The authors describe two French DAs of phonology, which manipulate linguistic environment and cue levels, and target structures that are late acquired in French speech sound development. The chapter presents preliminary data on them with French-speaking monolingual and bilingual children.