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Not all children who receive bilingual exposure from birth speak both of their languages. This paper examines receptive bilingualism in two bilingual children who reportedly speak Japanese to their Italian-speaking and English-speaking fathers. Analysis of audio recordings of parent-child interactions revealed that the two children produced some ut...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... were usually part of an adjacency pair, i.e., they demanded response and gave the parent a choice of whether or not to react, either verbally or non-verbally. Figure 1 shows the fathers' and children's language production. The results indicate that both fathers spoke their native languages consistently to the children. ...
Context 2
... English made up 40.3% of Nina's total utterances (c.f. Figure 1), 40.4% of them were 'routine' utterances. She often counted in English and used a particular rote-learned question to request cards in a card game. ...
Context 3
... the fathers' estimation of Max and Nina's Japanese production at 99% and 95% at the beginning of this study may be considered inaccurate based on the actual utterances produced in the audio recordings (c.f. Figure 1), their assessment was understandable, given that the weaker language was seldom used by the children to actively engage in conversation. The children's use of Japanese did not pose a serious problem for their fathers because they could comprehend Japanese. ...
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We investigated if and how the use of one or multiple languages (bilingualism hereafter) affects the perception of intervocalic singleton/geminate consonants in Italian and Japanese. Two groups of non-native listeners (monolingual speakers of Australian English and bilingual speakers of Cantonese/English or Vietnamese/English) were examined. Two gr...
Citations
... One of the means to form a national identity in a newly-formed nation is through language. As a country that lies in the Malay Archipelago, the Malay language has been chosen as the National Language of Malaysia, or Bahasa Kebangsaan (The 1963/67 National Language Acts, 2006. To materialise this nation-building effort, the National Education Policy has made Bahasa Melayu a compulsory subject to be taught and to be passed at the major public examination in Malaysian schools, known as 'Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia' (SPM, or the Malaysian Certificate of Education) (The 1961Education Act, 2016. ...
... However, the English language, which had been the language of administration, education, diplomacy, and commerce during Malaysia's pre-independence era, continues to be acknowledged as an important language for the nation and has been chosen as the nation's Official Second Language (The 1967National Language Act, 2016. To materialise this, the English language has been taught as a second language in primary and secondary schools as well as at higher learning institutions to all its people (Azar & Tanggaraju, 2020). ...
... 303, as cited in Wald, 1974), or in other words, they cannot speak the L2. They are also known as incipient bilinguals (Diebold, 1961) and receptive bilinguals (Hockett, 1958, as cited in Pousada, 2000Moradi, 2014;Nakamura, 2019). ...
... Unsurprisingly, P was mixing more when interacting with DE-speaking F. The child had a minimal amount of active DE vocabulary and phrases. Receptive bilingualism does not necessarily mean zero production, and, in line with findings by Nakamura (2018Nakamura ( , 2019, this scarce minority language output was mainly of re-active origin, meaning that it consisted mostly of non-original, imitated or routine words and phrases in reaction to what F was saying. P was not using DE independently and had not moved beyond the two-word utterances level in it. ...
Whereas many children in bilingual settings do not speak the minority language, very little is known about receptive bilingualism from the onset of speech and about such bilinguals activating their dormant language. Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic data, this paper reports on a case study of a receptive simultaneously bilingual Lithuanian-German boy who later started speaking both of his languages. Parents can do much for their children's bilingualism, but the child's agency is very important as well. The latter is much determined by the macro-socialisation factors, primarily by the communicative motivation of the child to use the minority language outside the bilingual home. Next to confirming possible insuf-ficiency of the OPOL model, the paper demonstrates how quickly passive languages can be activated and highlights the importance of continuity of input and the value of receptive bilingualism.
... As Hurtado andVega (2004) andKondo (1997) have shown, receptive bilinguals can become active/productive bilinguals. This is possible when parents put effort into their own language use and are involved in using the heritage language with their children, seeking productive use and not just understanding (receptive use) from the children (Nakamura, 2019). My study will focus on children's communication skills, or language use, examining in particular their understanding of Japanese (receptive skills), and their ability to speak Japanese (productive skills), as well as parental choices and encouragement of productive skills. ...
... Brown assumed that the reduced use of heritage language is due to parents' increasing English speaking proficiency. Consequently, despite their original intentions, parents' reduced use of the heritage language may shift the nature of children's bilingualism from active to receptive where children who were initially active users cease using the heritage language (Nakamura, 2019). ...
This study investigates the Japanese language maintenance of six intermarriage families in Australia, where one parent is a Japanese-origin immigrant with Japanese as their first language, and the other is of Australian- (or other-) origin and a speaker of English or other languages. The study explored their use of Japanese at home and the resulting impact on their children’s Japanese language ability and use, as well as on their perceived identities as plurilinguals. The children’s perspectives in relation to Japanese and Australian cultural influences, and parental attitudes and feelings about maintenance of the heritage language, and use of Japanese and English, are also explored. Four adult children of Japanese–Australian intermarriage families were additionally selected as participants in order to discover, from the perspective of adulthood, how their own and their parents’ choices about language use at home and being part of the Japanese community has affected their ongoing language maintenance and cultural identities.
Findings of the study included identification of tensions between parents around language choice at home, difficulties in sustaining Japanese use in an environment where Japanese was largely limited to the home, the importance of community interactions (including community language schools) on language maintenance and cultural affirmation, differences between families where mothers rather than fathers were the Japanese speaker, and recognition of changes to perceived identities as children became adults and realise the advantages and opportunities their bilingual heritage affords them.
