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e role of language input environments
for language outcomes and language
acquisition in young bilingual children
Annick De Houwer
University of Erfurt, Germany
is chapter outlines a holistic framework for approaching the study of language
input to children under age 6 acquiring oral languages in bilingual settings. Aer
a brief historical overview, the input factors discussed include relative timing of
input in two languages, cumulative, absolute and relative frequency of overall
language input, input frequency of linguistic categories, language models, the
people speaking to children and language choice patterns, communicative set-
tings and media use, and interactional style. e chapter addresses methodolog-
ical issues and gives an indication of the extent to which particular aspects of the
input have been investigated. It ends with a selective evaluation of links between
input and bilingual language outcomes and early bilingual acquisition.
1. Introduction: A brief history and setting the scene
More than a century ago, Ronjat (1913) published his colleague Grammont’s rec-
ommendation about the optimal language input setting for supporting early bilin-
gualism: everybody should stick to a single language in speaking to young children.
Because some people would use a dierent language from others, the child would
on the whole then have separate input in two languages. Ronjat implemented this
‘one person, one language’ (1P/1L) language choice recommendation for people
speaking to his son.
As recently uncovered by Grosjean (2015), there is no trace of any empirical
evidence from Grammont to support his recommendation. Nevertheless, since
Ronjat, the 1P/1L recommendation has been considered an ideal that parents wish-
ing to raise bilingual children should strive for. It is only recently that it has been
put to the empirical test (see below). Given this early emphasis on parental language
choice patterns in speech to children, it is tting that the rst empirical studies
to examine language input to young bilingual children had the same focus. In an
./sibil..hou
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
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128 Annick De Houwer
interview study Arnberg (1979) attempted to draw links between parental language
choice patterns, on the one hand, and children’s performance on an English word
recognition test and an unpublished Swedish translation, on the other (there is no
information on children’s ages, but some comments in the study suggest that at least
some of the children were of pre-school age). My interactional study based on lon-
gitudinal observational data involving approximately three-year-old bilingual Kate
and adults engaging with her showed that when interlocutors switched to using a
language they did not normally speak to her, Kate also switched (De Houwer, 1983).
Furthermore, Kate spoke more English to Dutch interlocutors than Dutch to an
English interlocutor, perhaps because she was sensitive to their dierent language
abilities. Döpke (1986) studied parents’ discourse behavior in interaction with their
German-English bilingual children and proposed that child centered interaction
styles could be key in supporting minority language development. In her study
of a two-year-old bilingual in interaction with her parents, Lanza (1988) showed
how repair sequences in bilingual families can be seen as negotiations about what
language a child is expected to use. Goodz (1989) uncovered that parents who
claimed to use the 1P/1L “rule” did not actually apply it all the time. De Houwer
(1990: 71–74) gave detailed information about the number of hours per day/week
that Kate heard each language, the language choices of the people in her social
network, her media use, trips she had taken, and the kind of language models she
heard, thus implying these factors could be relevant to bilingual acquisition.
Fitting for this volume’s anniversary issue, it was 25 years ago that Döpke (1992)
published her monograph on bilingual parental interaction strategies as the third
volume of the SiBil series. In the same year, Lanza published her inuential article
on parents’ interactional strategies, which was further elaborated on in her mon-
ograph from 1997. at year also saw the publication of two articles on dierent
aspects of language input to bilingual children and their possible role for bilingual
language development: one on the relative frequency with which children hear each
of their languages, proposing that young bilingual toddlers know more words in the
language they hear most oen (Pearson etal., 1997), and another on the absolute
frequencies of past verb forms in each language, proposing that Kate’s dierential
use in each language could be partially traced back to input frequency patterns of
verb forms as used by her adult interlocutors (De Houwer, 1997).
e two decades since 1997 have seen a steady increase in research attention
to the role of language input for early bilingual development, as evidenced, for
instance, in Grüter and Paradis’ (2014) edited volume. e journal Bilingualism:
Language and Cognition invited an article on input and bilingual development
(Carroll, 2017), followed by several peer commentaries. As these showed, there are
many dierent and oen contrastive perspectives on the relations between input
(“exposure”, in Carroll’s terms) and bilingual acquisition. Some of the divergent
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Chapter7. Language input environments and early bilingual development 129
discourses (e.g., compare Carroll, 2017; and Paradis, 2017) seem to stem from the
fact that the term “acquisition” is taken by some to refer only to individual processes
of acquiring language over time, whereas others see it as something much broader.
at is, many studies do not focus on explaining individual patterns of changes
in language use over time, but aim to discover which specic aspects of language
(“language outcomes”) can generally be expected to be used appropriately (in pro-
duction) or known (in comprehension) at a particular developmental stage or age.
Typically, language outcomes such as the ability to use the English third person
present tense -s marker (e.g., Blom & Paradis, 2015) are measured using standard-
ized instruments that are administered to a group of children. In studies of language
outcomes, the focus is on how children compare to others in their performance on
a specic measure, rather than on the process of individual development.
I cannot do justice to the many studies relevant to investigating input and bi-
lingual language acquisition and outcomes (a useful bibliography can be found as
supplemental material to Paradis, 2017). My main aim instead is to outline a frame-
work for approaching the study of language input to young children in bilingual
settings (similar to the one in De Houwer, 2009: 96–146). I give some attention to
research methods and an indication of the extent to which particular aspects of the
input have been investigated. I then briey explore how children could actually be
utilizing the language input they hear. is leads to a selective evaluation of links
between input and bilingual language outcomes and early bilingual acquisition,
both of which I subsume under the term “bilingual development”.
I limit my discussion to input in two spoken languages, although much will
be relevant for trilingual and quadrilingual settings and bimodal bilingualism. I
focus on typically developing children under age 6 who have not yet received any
formal literacy instruction (Unsworth, 2016, reviews work that includes primary
school aged children). I do not consider studies of young children who are getting
targeted input in a foreign language that is not normally spoken in local public life.
References to “input” refer to input in bilingual settings, unless stated otherwise.
2. e many facets of language input to young children growing
up in bilingual settings
Language input to children is the totality of language they hear. is simple de-
nition masks the fact that there are many dierent aspects to language input, espe-
cially in a bilingual setting. It is impossible to be complete but the range of factors
presented below is quite wide (see also Gathercole, 2014). e factors I discuss
are “proximal”, viz., they bear a direct relation to the actual speech children are
hearing at one time or over time, although some are more directly related than
© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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130 Annick De Houwer
others. Examples of proximal factors are the kinds of questions children are asked
(Palacios etal., 2015), the extent to which children are read to in a particular lan-
guage (Kibler etal., 2016), and how parents react when children address them in a
language parents do not speak to them (Juan-Garau & Pérez-Vidal, 2001). Proximal
factors are embedded in language-learning environments shaped by more “distal”
psychosocial and cultural factors such as maternal language ideologies (Nakamura,
2016), parental beliefs and attitudes (De Houwer, 1999, 2009), children’s living
conditions and social class dierences (Weisleder & Fernald, 2014), and the social
status of languages (Pearson, 2007).
2.1 Relative timing of input in two languages
e most basic distinction between dierent kinds of input to potentially bilin-
gual children refers to the relative timing of the start of input in two languages. In
a Bilingual First Language Acquisition (BFLA; Meisel, 1989) input setting, babies
start hearing two languages A and Alpha from the moment people start to verbally
interact with them. is occurs soon aer birth (babies may even be in a BFLA
setting prior to birth, see Byers-Heinlein, Burns, & Werker, 2010).
e second setting in which children may become bilingual is the Early Second
Language Acquisition (ESLA; De Houwer, 1990) input setting. Here babies start
rst being addressed in only a single language (L1). Only aer some time do they
start to be addressed in a second language (L2) in addition to the L1. is usually
happens through out of home care or preschool, so in an institutional setting (young
internationally adopted children will tend to hear their L2 in their new home, and
will normally no longer hear their L1; Genesee & Delcenserie, 2016). Children may
meet up with their L2 in out of home care already at the age of 3 months, but there
is wide variability amongst countries in the extent to which families enrol children
in care programs, in the ages at which children are enrolled, and in the amount of
time spent in care (Adamson, 2008).
It is not just the relative timing of the start of input in two languages that distin-
guishes BFLA and ESLA. Other aspects of input will also dier quite a bit depending
on whether children grow up in a BFLA or ESLA setting. In BFLA children grow up
in a bilingual family, with potentially many other family members as well as family
friends speaking either of two languages, or both. In ESLA children grow up in a
monolingual family, where the chance of family members and friends speaking
more than a single language is far lower than in BFLA.
e question is to what extent the dierences between BFLA and ESLA input
settings are reected in dierences between BFLA and ESLA children’s language
development. Rather than comment on this question in the section on links be-
tween input and bilingual development, I discuss it here.
© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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Chapter7. Language input environments and early bilingual development 131
Already in the rst year of life there are a number of dierences between BFLA
and monolingual children in how they perceive phonetic and phonological aspects
of their input languages (Serratrice, to appear). By extension, this is a dierence
between BFLA and ESLA children as well, given that the latter start o as mono-
linguals. We do not know how the early language learning trajectories of ESLA
children with input in the L2 starting at very early ages (say, 3 months) evolve,
though. Such children may well exhibit patterns that are more like those of BFLA
than monolingual children.
As reviewed in De Houwer (2009, 2017b), BFLA children learn to understand
two languages simultaneously. is is not generally the case for ESLA children:
many learn to understand their L1 rst. As implied by studies of monolingual chil-
dren, ESLA children starting to hear an L2 as early as at the age of 6 months will have
already formed phonological categories in their L1, and will be on the brink of the
rst understanding of words and phrases in the L1, thus patterning dierently from
BFLA children. BFLA children will oen start to speak in each of two languages at
around the same age. For ESLA children under age 6 the gap between when they
rst started to speak their L1 and their L2 may be as long as 4 years (ormore).
For each of their languages separately, BFLA toddlers understand and produce
similar or higher numbers of words as same aged monolinguals (De Houwer, 2010).
In contrast, ESLA preschoolers understand far fewer words in their L2 (English)
than monolingual English-speaking peers do (Bialystok etal., 2010). In the rst 6
years of life, the morphosyntactic structure of BFLA children’s sentences does not
show any systematic inuence from one language on the other (De Houwer, 2009).
In contrast, young ESLA children oen exhibit morphosyntactic inuence from
their L1 on their L2 (e.g., Blom & Paradis, 2015; Li Wei, 2011; Schwartz & Rovner,
2015; see also De Houwer, 2017b).
If BFLA preschoolers know one language better than the other one, the better
language is usually the one used at daycare or preschool (De Houwer, 2009). ESLA
children start o knowing the home language better. A stark contrast between ESLA
and BFLA children is that 97% of the former but only 70% of the latter actually
speak two languages (nding based on re-analysis of data in Table7 of De Houwer,
2007; note, however, that the data here are not limited to preschoolers but refer to
children between 1 and 20, with most of them between the ages of 6 and 9).
e facts of bilingual development showing basic early dierences between
BFLA and ESLA children’s language learning trajectories, then, warrant close at-
tention to documenting their language learning environments from when they
were born. Many input studies, however, ignore the important distinction between
BFLA and ESLA (Carroll, 2017).
© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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132 Annick De Houwer
Children’s language learning histories can only be assessed through caregiver
report. Large scale surveys suggest that in both western Europe and the U.S. BFLA
is three times more common than ESLA (De Houwer, 2007; Winsler etal., 2014).
2.2 Cumulative and absolute frequency of language input
e distinction between BFLA and ESLA is directly related to the duration of the
frequency of input that children globally receive in each language, which leads to a
cumulative frequency. In BFLA, this duration and thus cumulative input frequency
is in principle the same for both languages, given that children will have received
input in each language for the same number of years; in ESLA, cumulative input
in each language is by denition dierent, because L1 input started earlier than
input in L2, and thus the input in L1 over time will have been of longer duration
than the input in L2.
Both within BFLA and ESLA breaks in the input in a particular language are
common (e.g., the only person oering Danish input to a BFLA child growing up
with Danish and German goes on a long trip; ESLA children who hear only Turkish
at home but visit a Dutch preschool go on vacation to Turkey). Indeed, a bilingual
input setting is highly variable. Input in a language can be quite limited in terms of
overall frequency of use, or even temporarily stopped altogether, with then changes
back to an opposite pattern. Marchman etal. (2016) emphasize how this variability
makes it hard to correctly evaluate a bilingual input environment. ere can be no
assumption, then, of more or less equal levels of overall input in both languages
throughout a child’s early language learning years.
Building on this insight, Unsworth (2013) developed the measure of cumulative
length of exposure, based on a retrospective parental assessment of who children
spent time with and what language(s) these people addressed children in. is
information is translated into a single absolute measure aiming to “compact” the
real number of life years that children heard a particular language as part of their
total bilingual input into the virtual number of life years that children presumably
heard just that language, regardless of their age.
1 A major methodological hurdle
here relates to validity. It is questionable that parents can accurately reconstruct
their children’s lives three, four or even more years prior to being asked and can
know for certain which language(s) people spoke to their children in their absence.
1. e aim behind this is to create a better basis for comparing bilinguals to monolinguals.
us, a 6-year old BFLA child with, say, 3 years of “virtual” input to a language would then be
compared to a 3-year old monolingual. ere are many issues here, not in the least the fact that
a “real” 6-year-old has dierent levels of cognitive maturity than a 3-year-old (Long & Rothman,
2014).
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Chapter7. Language input environments and early bilingual development 133
Whatever the measurement method, the duration of bilingual children’s cu-
mulative input frequency in a particular language largely depends on the conti-
nuity of particular language choice patterns by people talking to them. If parents
change from speaking language A to speaking language Alpha to children, this has
a direct eect on the cumulative input frequency for both languages. In a study
of 31 French- or Dutch-speaking mothers in bilingual families, De Houwer and
Bornstein (2016) found hardly any variations in maternal language choice pat-
terns over a two-and-a-half-year period. us, most children had continuing input
in whatever language mothers addressed them in. However, parents may shi to
speaking a dierent language to children from the one they started out using with
them (Nakamura, 2016). Oen this shi happens when children start attending
(pre-)school (De Houwer, 2017c; Ho etal., 2014; Silvén etal., 2014). Cumulative
input frequency is a measure of absolute input frequency, that is, a count of the
number of years, months, weeks, or even hours that children heard particular
languages, linguistic categories, pragmatic functions, lexical items, or any other
linguistic element.
Many studies give an indication of how many years or months a child has
heard two languages. is may be too rough an index: Hart and Risley (1995) and
Weisleder and Fernald (2013) found vast dierences between homes in how many
words children heard per hour (for English and Spanish respectively). e cumula-
tive eect of dierences in monolingual parental speaking rates over the years can
be such that one child hears 10 million words over three years, whereas another
child might hear 30 million (Hart & Risley, 1995: 131–132).
Few studies investigate the actual amount of speech heard by children in bi-
lingual settings. De Houwer (2014) recorded mothers in French-Dutch bilingual
families in Dutch dyadic interaction with their 13-month old rstborn infant and
again 7 months later, and analyzed several measures of frequency in maternal
speech. Using the LENATM system, Marchman etal. (2016) tallied the number
of Spanish and English words that dierent people addressed to three-year-old
bilinguals. Both studies found large variability in speaking rates, thus conrming
monolingual ndings.
e bilingual mothers’ speaking rates in De Houwer (2014) did not dier from
those of demographically matched Dutch-speaking mothers in monolingual fam-
ilies recorded in similar circumstances. e results from Marchman etal. (2016),
who show the number of Spanish words per hour anyone addressed to bilingual
preschoolers as ranging between 127 and 947, are quite comparable to those from
Weisleder and Fernald (2013), who nd a range of 67 to 1,200 Spanish words per
hour for a demographically similar monolingual Spanish-speaking sample address-
ing toddlers. us, for at least one of a bilingual child’s input languages there need
© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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134 Annick De Houwer
not be any dierence with the absolute amount of input that monolingual children
receive.
Not only is there variability amongst bilingual parents’ speaking rates in a par-
ticular language at any one time, there is also variability over time within one
individual parent’s speaking rate (Song etal., 2012). is variability relates to chil-
dren’s ages: Mothers in bilingual families tend to speak more to toddlers than to
infants (De Houwer, 2014; cf. also my re-analysis of data in van de Weijer (2000) in
DeHouwer, 2009: 121–122). In spite of this variability over time, maternal speaking
rates in dyadic interaction with bilingual children are stable, that is, mothers who
speak less than others at time 1 speak equally less than others at time 2 (DeHouwer,
2014).
Aer their children are 30 months of age, monolingual parents’ speaking rates
when addressing children decrease (Wells, 1986). is doesn’t necessarily mean
that children hear less talk: other kinds of interlocutors such as peers and teachers
start to play a larger role, and children also increasingly have more media exposure
(De Houwer, 2000). We need data on bilingual parents to investigate their speaking
rates as children grow older.
Speaking rates are not the only factor determining absolute input frequency. A
second aspect concerns the total amount of time that children could in principle be
hearing language. e latter in turn depends on their sleep patterns and the amount
of time they spend alone without language input through media, both of which
can be quite variable. De Houwer and Bornstein (2003) developed the Language
Input Diary (LID) to measure how much time children spent with dierent peo-
ple and what language(s) these people spoke during which activities (audiovis-
ual media exposure could also be recorded). Place and Ho (2011, 2016) used an
English translation of the LID that I provided, and translated that into Spanish so
it could be used with Spanish-English bilingual families. Parents lled out the diary
once a week for 7 weeks. In the Dutch-French bilingual study for which the LID
was originally designed, caregivers ideally lled it out once a week for 15 months
(DeHouwer, 2011). e diary is lled out in real time per block of 30 minutes so
the information asked is still fresh in memory. It can yield a wealth of information
but does not by itself provide information on how much language children hear.
However, information gained through the LID, combined with observation-based
data on the speaking rates of people who frequently interact with children, can
furnish a comprehensive picture of global absolute input frequency.
In addition to diering in how much they speak per time unit, and how much in
each language, parents also dier in the absolute number of mixed utterances they
use in addressing children (mixed utterances combine morphemes from two lan-
guages). Observational group studies show some parents using only an occasional
one (De Houwer & Bornstein, 2016) or quite many (Tare & Gelman, 2011); these
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Chapter7. Language input environments and early bilingual development 135
large dierences are conrmed in studies where parents self-reported on their use
of mixed utterances (Byers-Heinlein, 2013; Place & Ho, 2016).
2.3 e claim of “reduced input” for bilingual children
ere exists a widespread notion that young bilinguals receive less or even only half
the input in each of their languages compared to monolinguals. To my knowledge,
Hyams (1991: 77) was the rst to claim that the input to bilingual children repre-
sents only 50% in each language of the input that monolingual children receive. is
statement appeared in a response to Klein (1991) who emphasized the importance
of the absolute frequency of input for child language acquisition. According to
Hyams, Klein’s argument that quantity of input is an important factor in language
acquisition was wrong, because, she wrote, bilingual and monolingual children
follow the same general course of language development in spite of the former
having only half the input that the latter receive.
Hyams’ (1991) idea that for one language bilingual children get half the input of
monolingual children continued to be used as support for nativist theories of lan-
guage acquisition: “bilingual children (who presumably hear only half as much of
each language they are learning as do monolingual children, unless they sleep less)
acquire both languages in about the same time that it takes the monolingual child to
learn one language. at is, bilinguals speak at the level appropriate to their age, not
the level appropriate to their exposure time. Such ndings argue that maturational
level, not extent of opportunities for practice, is the chief limiting factor in language
growth” (Gleitman & Newport, 1995: 11). Similarly, Sorace (2005) stated that bi-
lingual children receive half the input in each of their languages that monolinguals
receive, and suggested that this “quantitatively reduced input” (p. 74) may have
important consequences for the eciency of language processing. Ameel, Storms
and Malt (2007: 1679) also assumed that “compared to monolinguals, bilinguals get
only half the input in each language”, and they set up several psycholinguistic adult
processing studies on the basis of this assumption.
Paradis, Tremblay, and Crago (2008) write: “Bilingual children receive less in-
put in each of their two languages than monolingual age-mates” (p. 378). is less
extreme view oen functions as a general axiomatic background assumption in
studies of bilingual and heritage language acquisition (see, e.g., Byers-Heinlein &
Fennell, 2014; Montrul, 2012; Pirvulescu, Pérez-Leroux, & Roberge, 2012; Scheele
etal., 2010). Ironically, in these studies Hyams’ claim of “reduced input” for bilin-
guals as a basis for refuting the importance of input frequency in language acqui-
sition has been turned on its head: e notion of bilinguals’ purported “reduced
input”, a measure of input frequency, now functions as an a priori explanation for
a range of phenomena-in-acquisition.
© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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136 Annick De Houwer
In 1996, Paradis and Genesee cautiously wrote that “bilingual children […]
probably receive less input than monolinguals in each language” (p. 20). We need
to go back to that caution. If scholars want to make the claim of bilingual children
generally receiving less input in each of their languages than monolinguals, they
should rst empirically examine it on its validity. One reason that most researchers
have not bothered to actually study the absolute amount of input to bilinguals may
be a belief in the notion of “reduced input”.
So far, as reviewed above, De Houwer’s (2014) is the only study that has empir-
ically compared the actual amount of input to bilingual versus monolingual chil-
dren; it used the same design for both groups but focused on only one of bilingual
children’s languages. No group dierences emerged. In addition, some individual
bilingual children received more Dutch maternal input than some individual mono-
lingual children. My comparison of the bilingual results in Marchman etal. (2016)
and the monolingual results in Weisleder and Fernald (2013) conrms these nd-
ings for Spanish. is shows that the claim of “reduced input” for bilingual children
does not apply to all of them. It is premature to characterize all bilingual subjects in
studies as having “reduced input” without actually checking on their input.
One may say, very well, “reduced input” in a particular language does not nec-
essarily apply to all bilingual children, but it applies to the population of bilinguals
on average. e rationale here is: (1) on average, the population of monolingual
children receives X amount of input in a single language; (2) the population of bi-
lingual children receives input in two languages, ergo (3) the average X amount of
the monolinguals must be divided amongst the two languages – it may not mean
X/2 for each language, but it will be less for each. is argument appears logical,
but relies on an assumption that can be challenged. e assumption underlying (1)
is that it is valid to rely on an average number of words heard by the population of
monolingual children. As Hart and Risley (1995) showed, there are huge dierences
amongst English-learning children in how many words they hear. We also know
there are large dierences amongst cultures and languages in the amount of talk to
young children (e.g., Ho & Tian, 2005). is wide variation makes any notion of
average or mean (which is normally seen as a central value that other values closely
evolve around, in Gaussian distributions) statistically meaningless. It is highly im-
probable that there is any central tendency, given the huge range of variation in the
language experiences of monolingual children worldwide.
For anyone interested in understanding the extent to which input frequency
inuences language acquisition (whether in bilinguals or monolinguals), it is pre-
cisely the range of children’s actual experiences that is of interest, not an inherently
vacuous population mean (cf. also De Houwer, 2009: 119–121).
We will never be able to empirically establish the validity of the overall “reduced
input” claim for the population of bilingual children compared to monolinguals.
© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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Chapter7. Language input environments and early bilingual development 137
ere remains only the possibility of constructing sample means for monolingual
groups that are then compared to demographically similar sample means for bilin-
gual groups, as done in De Houwer (2014).
More fundamentally, though, the notion of “reduced input” for the population
of bilinguals is based on a comparison with monolinguals. is implies that mono-
linguals are held up as a standard. e negative connotation of the term “reduced”
further implies a decit stance, where bilinguals as a group are assumed to be in
a position inferior to that of monolinguals, without any empirical evidence. is
is unfortunate, and scholars should be careful not to make the claim of “reduced
input” in any venues or publications that may be accessible to educators and parents
dealing with bilingual children. is would not be of benet to them.
2.4 Relative input frequency
Absolute input frequencies measured for each language yield the derived measure
of relative input frequency (oen erroneously referred to as “amount” of input).
is is, in principle, based on a comparison of absolute input frequencies across
languages or categories or tokens. For instance, children who hear their L1 8 hours
and their L2 6 hours every day have more input in L1, with a proportion of 0.57 to
0.43, where 1.00 equals 14 hours.
Usually, however, no absolute input frequency measures for global language use
are collected. Instead, parents are asked to estimate the proportion of time that their
children hear either of their languages, or receive more detailed questions about
children’s care arrangements and about who speaks what language(s) to them.
Researchers then compute proportions of use of each language (typically expressed
as percentages of an unknown total). In their calculation of the proportions of input
in each language to toddlers, Cattani etal. (2014) introduce a correction based on
parental estimates of the amounts of time children spend in various communicative
settings. ey weight the hours spent with fathers less than the hours spent with
mothers, based on the assumption that paternal speaking rates to children are lower
(cf. Pierce etal., 2015).
e only study so far to empirically compare quasi contemporaneous observed
absolute and reported relative input frequencies in speech addressed to the same
group of young bilinguals found that both measures identied the same language
as being used most oen and found a very moderate correlation between measures,
although for several families there were large discrepancies (Marchman etal., 2016).
Importantly, though, reported relative input frequencies masked considerable var-
iability between children’s actual language experience. For instance, a child who
reportedly heard Spanish 80% of the time was hearing only 200 Spanish words per
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138 Annick De Houwer
hour, whereas another child who reportedly heard Spanish only around half the
time was hearing nearly three times as many words per hour (Marchman etal.,
2016: Figure1a).
Relative input frequency proportions usually do not take into account mixed
utterances, or times that children hear both languages in the same context (but see
Place & Ho, 2016). is may ignore a substantial amount of variability between
families and an important part of language input (Carroll, 2017). Furthermore,
usually, possible changes over time in proportions of language input are not men-
tioned (but see Hurtado etal., 2014, who could nd no such changes from child
age 30 to 36 months).
2.5 Input frequency of linguistic categories
Although studies make claims about input frequency dierences for a particular
linguistic category in dual language input (e.g., Paradis etal., 2011), surprisingly
few provide empirical data on actual speech addressed to children. Category type
and token frequencies of specic linguistic categories need to be based on the actual
language models that children hear. At the very least, there needs to be detailed
information about the oral varieties children are hearing. It makes a dierence
whether children are growing up with a language variety that is strongly inuenced
by the other language they are hearing. For instance, if children hear both Hindi
and English in India, it would be wrong to assume they are hearing the kind of
standard English globally taught in classrooms. English in India is a variety with
its own particular features that has been inuenced by Hindi (Mishra & Mishra,
2016). Especially in a bilingual setting, it is important to take this into account. All
too oen forms that bilingual children use are seen as the result of cross-linguistic
transfer whereas in reality they are likely modelled aer the varieties children hear
(De Houwer, 2009; Paradis & Navarro, 2003).
2.6 Language models
Children can learn from all the language models they regularly hear. For scholars
studying bilingual children’s acquisition it is thus of prime importance to know
what these models are (De Houwer, 2009).
Many parents in bilingual families (and, indeed, in monolingual families!)
speak a language to their children that they did not learn as an L1 (they may in
addition speak their L1 to children). Oen, parents in bilingual families who speak
a language as their L2 show some inuences from their L1 in their speech, or make
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Chapter7. Language input environments and early bilingual development 139
errors in their L2 (Yamamoto, 2005). Parents who use an L2 with their children may
also have a limited L2 lexical repertoire.
More and more, input studies are asking parents to rate their prociency in one
or both of the languages their children are hearing (Hammer etal., 2012; Paradis
& Kirova, 2014). Studies by Ho and colleagues (e.g., Place & Ho, 2016) assess
parental “native speaker” status (unfortunately without further explanation).
What matters in language input, of course, is what is actually said to children
and how it is said (cf. also Place & Ho, 2016). In a rare study looking at the actual
speech patterns of parents in bilingual families, Bosch and Ramon-Casas (2011)
found variability, inconsistencies and some errors in bilingual mothers’ vowel pro-
ductions. In order to explain elements of children’s own productions, we need to
know about such facts.
2.7 e people speaking to children and language choice patterns
It might matter what person speaks what language to children, and it might matter
whether a particular language is shared by important people in bilingual children’s
lives (see also the section on “Diversity and uniformity in language presentation”,
De Houwer, 2009: 111). Parental input patterns have been linked to children’s lan-
guage use, as have the language choices made by older siblings (see below).
Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, language choice patterns do not di-
rectly reveal anything about amount of input. Rodina and Westergaard (2017) inter-
pret the fact that children heard Russian from both parents (RR) rather than from
just mothers (with fathers speaking Norwegian, NR) as constituting a dierence
in amount of input. is needs to be empirically validated. For instance, fathers in
RR families might work hours that do not coincide with children’s waking hours,
while mothers might speak more Russian to children in RR than in NR families
(in fact, half the mothers in NR families addressed children in both Russian and
Norwegian). Furthermore, the fact that both parents in a family share the same
(minority) language while other parent pairs do not correlates with many other
potentially important input aspects rather than just absolute input frequency (De
Houwer, 2007). For instance, discourse patterns may be very dierent, with NR
families switching between languages and translating to and fro; also the fact that
Norwegian fathers knew no Russian but Russian mothers used Norwegian at home
with fathers likely created a bilingual setting in which it became optional for chil-
dren to actually speak much Russian, and it was perhaps their lesser practice with
Russian that helps explain why NR children performed worse on a Russian gender
task than RR children (Rodina & Westergaard, 2017). It is also likely that RR fam-
ilies had more Russian speaking friends and interacted more strongly with family
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140 Annick De Houwer
in Russia. is would not only have an eect on absolute input frequency but also,
possibly, on attitudinal language alignment and children’s opportunities to hear
more varied speech models.
2.8 Communicative settings and media use
Another aspect pertaining to language input concerns the communicative settings
in which children hear language. Typically, one thinks of input as consisting of
dyadic face-to-face interaction, with participants sharing the same space. However,
face-to-face interaction can also consist of multi-party interaction (Place & Ho,
2011, report a daily average of 3.27 hours that bilingual two-years-olds interact
with both parents, with or without others); in addition, there can be telephone or
real time video-contact.
In addition to face-to-face interaction, children may overhear language not
addressed to them (possible in multi-party interaction, or when mother is talk-
ing on the telephone, for instance). We know very little about bilingual children’s
exposure to overheard speech and how it may aect their language development
(but see De Houwer, 2009: 101–103). Overheard speech is particularly relevant to
some trilingual settings where children are addressed in each of two languages, but
where parents address each other in a third (Chevalier, 2015; Nakamura, 2016).
Another input setting where children are not expected to talk occurs when
they watch television or puppet theater shows and the like, or when they are lis-
tening to audio material. ese aspects are taken into account more and more
in questionnaires scholars use to assess children’s language environments (e.g.,
Paradis & Kirova, 2014). Place and Ho (2011) report that bilingual two-year-olds
experienced media exposure for an average of nearly an hour a day. Bellay (2016)
richly documents four bilingual siblings’ experiences with dierent kinds of media
(including print media and narrations).
2.9 Interactional style
ere are many aspects of how people interact with young children that go well
beyond the sheer amount of talk they address to them. In conversing with children,
adults will, for instance, use pragmatic functions such as directives, they will have
specic ways in which they respond to children’s questions, or they may use child
directed speech (CDS), a specic register for speech to children characterized by,
amongst others, specic pitch patterns, a lot of repetition, and some very specic
vocabulary items. All these aspects fall under interactional style. So far, few studies
have studied these aspects in speech to bilingual children. A notable exception is
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Chapter7. Language input environments and early bilingual development 141
the study by Palacios etal. (2015), who found large variability amongst mothers
in the number and kinds of questions they asked their English-Spanish bilingual
4-year-olds.
ere are specic bilingual aspects of conversational behavior that may be fun-
damental to bilingual children actually speaking two languages rather than just one
(De Houwer, 2011, 2017c). Lanza (1992, 1997) proposed a continuum of parental
discourse strategies ranging from monolingual strategies, that is, those that encour-
age children to use just a single language (e.g., asking children to repeat something
they said in “the language mommy speaks”) to bilingual strategies, which allow
children to use either of two languages, or even a language the parent is not speak-
ing to them (e.g., continuing with a conversation in language A, without asking
children to repeat what they just said in language Alpha). Studies documenting
such conversational strategies include Kasuya (1998) and Tare and Gelman’s (2011)
unique group study.
3. Language intake
Children are not parrots: they do not “automatically” imitate and mirror whatever
(bits of) spoken utterances they hear. Rather, they are maturing individuals who, in
an intensely personal experience, must process and select aspects of their language
input. is is their language intake (Wijnen, 2000; De Houwer, 2017a). Language
intake dynamically drives children’s developing language skills.
In selecting “data” from their input children process physical and distributional
characteristics of speech they hear. What they (can) process depends on, amongst
others, their processing “proclivities” (Newman etal., 2016), the linguistic knowl-
edge and skill they already have (Wijnen, 2000), a cognitive preparedness to pro-
cess certain aspects of the input (Gathercole & Ho, 2007), and their general level
of maturity and the opportunities they have had to practice their language skills
(De Houwer, 2017a; Hurtado etal., 2014; Long & Rothman, 2014). Conversely,
language input may steer child-internal factors (e.g., Weisleder & Fernald, 2013,
found that richer language experiences strengthened children’s language processing
eciency).
Regardless of how many languages they hear, children’s intake of language in-
put depends on a multitude of child-internal factors. Immediate relations between
input and children’s language prociencies and use, then, are not to be expected.
Nevertheless, many aspects of bilingual children’s language use are associated with
input related factors. ese are briey outlined below.
© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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142 Annick De Houwer
4. Links between input and bilingual children’s language development
As already discussed above, bilingual children under age 6 develop language quite
dierently depending on the relative timing of the start of input in two languages.
It really matters in the rst 6 years of life whether children grew up in a BFLA or
ESLA setting. We do not know whether this continues to be the case as children
move on to the primary school years. e duration of the input in the L2 has been
shown to aect ESLA children’s L2 language outcomes: ESLA children who had
longer exposure to their L2 English were better at using English tense inection
than others with less long exposure (Blom & Paradis, 2015). e norms for the
assessment of ESLA preschoolers’ morphosyntactic outcomes in German as an L2
take into account children’s length of contact with the L2 (Schulz & Tracy, 2011).
Frequent evidence from case studies (De Houwer, 2009: 127–132) shows that
children’s language production in each of their languages can uctuate quite dra-
matically in response to changes in language input. For instance, bilingual children
may become much more talkative and uent in one of their languages soon aer
arriving in a new country where everyone speaks just one of children’s languages
(Garlin, 2008; Silva-Corvalán, 2014), or aer starting day care. Conversely, de-
creases in opportunities to speak a language may lead to rapid decline in children’s
ability in that language. Slavkov (2015) carefully documented such changes in a
Bulgarian-English toddler growing up in Canada. Before she le on a trip to Bulgaria
where she was no longer hearing any English, the child hardly spoke any Bulgarian,
but spoke English very well. It took just 5 days for her to start speaking a lot more
in Bulgarian and to jump from a mean length of utterance of 1.25 in Bulgarian to
3.07, whilst at the same time she soon started to use less and less English (with her
father, who she had previously mostly addressed in uent English); in addition, her
English mean length of utterance went down from 4.76 to 2.95 in just 5 days. As
Slavkov (2015) notes, whether these large and fast changes were due to an increase
in absolute input frequency, an increase in motivation on the child’s part to speak
Bulgarian, the increase in the number of people speaking Bulgarian (before the trip,
the child only heard her father speak Bulgarian), or the increase in communicative
contexts in which Bulgarian was heard – that is impossible to say. Most likely the
combination of all those factors played a role.
Because of the paucity of studies measuring absolute input frequency we know
hardly anything about its possible eect on bilingual development. Two studies
that have considered language outcomes in relation to input frequency suggest that
there is indeed a role for absolute frequency. In comparisons for each language,
Marchman etal. (2016) found that the number of words spoken to BFLA children
related to their on line eciency in word comprehension as well as to their test
scores on language prociency measures. e absolute frequency of English input
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Chapter7. Language input environments and early bilingual development 143
by teachers predicted ESLA children’s growth in receptive vocabulary over the rst
year of preschool (Bowers & Vasilyeva, 2011).
Several studies have shown correlations between reported current relative in-
put frequency for each language and young bilingual children’s language outcomes
(most of the studies look at BFLA children). Correlations have been found for a
wide range of outcomes, e.g., the extent to which children reportedly switch to
language A when addressed in language Alpha (Ribot & Ho, 2014), phonological
memory skill (Parra etal., 2011), growth in receptive vocabulary (Scheele etal.,
2010), language processing eciency (Hurtado etal., 2014), and reported produc-
tion vocabulary size (Ho etal., 2012). Marchman etal. (2016) found marginal
eects of reported relative input frequency but absolute measures far better pre-
dicted children’s language outcomes in each language than relative measures did.
As reviewed in De Houwer (2009), the combined evidence from case studies
focusing on acquisition is that children who do much better in one language than in
the other oen hear that language relatively more oen and in more circumstances
than the other one.
e few existing linguistic category frequency studies rely on transcript-based
counts of type and/or token frequencies of morphosyntactic categories in the in-
put. Whenever case studies of BFLA children have attempted to do so, they have
found correlations between adult category frequencies and child category use
(De Houwer, 1997; Paradis & Navarro, 2003; Rieckborn, 2006; Silva-Corvalán &
Montanari, 2008), thus lending some evidence for De Houwer’s (1990) suggestion
that in order for BFLA children to be able to develop two separate morphosyntactic
systems, they must pay close attention to the input. Such close attention is already
evident in 7-month-old BFLA children (Gervain & Werker, 2013).
Ho and colleagues’ research program (e.g., Place & Ho, 2016) has so far pro-
vided the most convincing evidence that (BFLA) children’s language models relate
to their language outcomes. Children who heard English from “native speakers”
had better English skills than children who heard English from highly procient
“non-native speakers”. Just what it is in the input that diers between these two
types of input providers remains to be examined. A case study suggests that a
mother who spoke Spanish as an L2 to her child and produced a lot more overt
subjects than Spanish-as-L1 speakers inuenced her Spanish-English child’s fre-
quent use of overt subjects in Spanish (Paradis & Navarro, 2003).
e next point concerns the people speaking to children and language choice
patterns in relation to language outcomes. Yamamoto (2001) and De Houwer (2007)
found that 17 to 27%, respectively, of children who heard two languages through
the 1P/1L rule as practiced by parents in the home did not in fact speak two lan-
guages. Children in bilingual homes were far more likely to speak two languages
if both parents spoke a minority language at home and one parent in addition
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144 Annick De Houwer
spoke the majority language (De Houwer, 2007). us, the 1P/1L rule is neither a
sucient nor a necessary language choice pattern to support children’s use of two
languages. e gender of the parent providing input in each language does not bear
any relation to whether children speak two languages (De Houwer, 2007). Bridges
and Ho (2014) found that having older siblings who spoke English to toddlers
in Spanish-English bilingual homes increased toddlers’ English vocabulary; those
without a school-aged older sibling were more advanced in Spanish. In a sam-
ple of Spanish-English bilingual families with a lower SES than those studied by
Bridges and Ho (2014), Kibler, Palacios and Simpson Baird (2014) showed simi-
larly strong sibling inuence: e more older siblings they had, the less likely it was
that children between 2 and 4 would address their mothers and other children in
just Spanish. Hammer etal. (2012) examined a number of environmental factors,
including proximal input factors, to help explain bilingual 4-year-olds’ performance
on a receptive vocabulary test and on a story recall task. ey identied dierent
relations between factors and language outcomes depending on the language and
depending on the specic language outcome. Over and above environmental fac-
tors, however, it was children’s own language choice patterns with key communica-
tive partners that could explain their receptive vocabulary in each language. Place
and Ho’s (2016) study suggests that children’s language skills are aected by the
number of people that speak a particular language to children.
ere has been little systematic attention to the role of communicative set-
tings and media use in children’s bilingual development. In an experimental study,
Genesee etal. (2006) showed how very young bilingual children adjusted their lan-
guage choice to that of unfamiliar interlocutors. Tare and Gelman (2011) examined
whether the presence of a monolingual bystander while mothers interacted with
their bilingual children would aect children’s language choice (it didn’t). Dixon
(2011) found that Singaporean bilingual preschoolers who watched TV mainly in
English rather than also in Chinese, Tamil or Malay had higher English receptive
vocabulary scores and that the eect of watching TV in English was greater than
that of having a nanny address children in English.
Kibler etal. (2016) show how older siblings interacted with their bilingual
preschool-aged siblings in ways that supported preschoolers’ language develop-
ment. is study of interactional style in bilingual settings complements studies of
parental discourse strategies that socialize children into using just a single language
or allowing two. Juan-Garau and Pérez-Vidal (2001) document how a child who
was speaking only Catalan in spite of having Catalan and English input from birth
changed to also speaking English aer his father adjusted his discourse strate-
gies and introduced a supposedly monolingual English-speaking puppet to coax
the child into speaking English. In a group study of maternal book reading with
young bilingual children, Tare and Gelman (2011) found a direct relation between
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Chapter7. Language input environments and early bilingual development 145
maternal explicit prompts to translate a particular word and children’s furnishing
of a translation equivalent. us, maternal interaction strategies directly supported
vocabulary learning.
In the rst exploration of its kind, Byers-Heinlein (2013) found that higher
parental reported language mixing rates predicted smaller English comprehension
vocabularies in 18-month old children who heard English and one of a wide range
of other languages (but see Place & Ho, 2016). Byers-Heinlein (2013) speculates
that one underlying reason could be that processing mixed utterances is a more
challenging task for infants, rendering it more dicult for them to identify and
thus learn words.
Over and above relations between language input and child language outcomes,
particular input aspects may also aect children’s metalinguistic knowledge: Tare
and Gelman (2011: 775) suggested that parents’ frequent furnishing of translation
equivalents may contribute to children not regarding an object’s name as inextrica-
bly tied to the object itself. Oades-Sese and Li (2011) established that high quality
child-caregiver relationships positively aect preschool-age bilingual children’s
language prociency in both languages.
5. Conclusion
e identication here of possible aspects of bilingual children’s language input is
far from complete and leaves out a lot of detail. What is very clear is that language
input to bilingual children is variable and dynamic. It is, so to speak, a moving
target. is makes it extra dicult to accurately describe bilingual children’s lan-
guage input over time. It is even more dicult, then, to try and nd links with yet
another moving target, children’s developing bilingual prociencies. However it is
measured, though, the combined evidence shows that amount of input to bilingual
children matters.
Whether it is best to mainly rely on a secondary measure of amount of input,
viz., relative amount of input based on parental report, is an open question. Goodz
(1989) already noted a discrepancy between parental reported language choice
in speaking to their children and parents’ observed input (see also De Houwer &
Bornstein, 2016; Marchman etal., 2016). Using reported “running” data such as
those from the LID may be a better option than relying on aer-the-fact question-
naires or interviews (Place & Ho, 2016).
Ideal would be to have in depth and longitudinal measures of absolute input
frequency available. Measuring actual input patterns that reect everyday natural-
istic interactions in the absence of an investigator is notoriously dicult, cumber-
some, and time consuming. ere is no easy solution to this problem. e LENATM
© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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146 Annick De Houwer
system (Marchman etal., 2016) could in principle be useful, but needs to be tested
for use with languages other than English and Spanish. Regardless of the method
chosen, even in the LENATM case, any recordings-based study will have the need
for labor-intensive coding and/or transcription.
Because of developing language attitudes (Carroll, 2017; Hammer etal., 2012),
children may not be willing to use one of the languages they hear (De Houwer,
2017c). is may lead parents to adjust their language choice and start to use a
minority language less and less frequently (ibid.). us, children’s own language
behavior can fundamentally aect the input, over and above changes in CDS as
children mature linguistically.
Relations between environmental factors and early bilingual development,
then, are highly complex and dynamic (see also Cha & Goldenberg, 2015). ey
are intricately connected with the specic sociocultural power constellations in the
society children and their families live in. Universally, if BFLA preschool children
speak a language better than their other one, or if they speak only a single lan-
guage, it is the language used in the wider society that wins out (De Houwer, 2017c;
Pearson, 2007). Even ESLA children may soon replace their L1 by the new L2 they
are learning through (pre)school. A more holistic approach to input needs to take
these power relations into account. It is only by examining these in combination
with more proximal aspects of input and children’s own developing minds that we
will gain a deeper understanding of what drives bilingual development.
Acknowledgements
I dedicate this chapter to Dr. J. S. Bruner, who passed away at 100 years of age just before prepa-
ration of this chapter started, to honor his foundational work emphasizing the crucial role of
child-adult social interaction and intersubjectivity (Tomasello, 2016).
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