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Dual language input and the impact of language separation on early lexical development
Abstract
We examined properties of the input and the environment that characterize bilingual exposure in 11‐month‐old infants with a regular exposure to French and an additional language, and their possible effects on receptive vocabulary size. Using a diary method, we found that a majority of the families roughly followed a one‐parent–one‐language approach. Yet, the two languages co‐occurred to various extents within the same half‐hour both within and across speakers. We used exploratory correlation analyses to examine potential effects of the dual input on the size of infants’ vocabularies. The results revealed some evidence for an impact of language separation by speakers.
... It is common for bilingual parents to mix languages when talking to their children (Bail et al., 2015;Byers-Heinlein, 2013;Kremin et al. 2022a). However, only a handful of studies have investigated how language mixing is related to children's language development and existing findings are equivocal (Bail et al., 2015;Byers-Heinlein, 2013;Carbajal & Peperkamp, 2020;Place & Hoff, 2011. Moreover, although bilingual parents begin using mixed language with their children as early as 10 months old, most research on mixed input's relation with language development has focused on toddlers and older children. ...
... Relatively little research has studied the relation between language mixing and child language development and, so far, evidence is equivocal. While some studies have found that more exposure to language mixing is related to a smaller receptive vocabulary size (Byers-Heinlein, 2013;Carbajal & Peperkamp, 2020), others suggest a neutral relation especially when considering a wide range of language skills (Bail et al., 2015;Byers-Heinlein, 2013;Place & Hoff, 2011. As well, there is evidence suggesting that infants can benefit from mixed-language input (Bail et al., 2015;Place & Hoff, 2016). ...
... In that same study, the author measured children's vocabulary size in the dominant language of the community (English) and found that, when infant age, gender, percentage of English input, and language balance were held constant, a higher rate of parent-reported language mixing was linked to a smaller receptive vocabulary size in 1.5-year-old children. Carbajal and Peperkamp found a similar pattern in 11-montholds exposed to French and another language in France: infants who encountered more language mixing by the same speaker within a 30-minute block tended to have a smaller receptive vocabulary in French (Carbajal & Peperkamp, 2020). ...
Language mixing is a common feature of many bilingually-raised children's input. Yet how it is related to their language development remains an open question. The current study investigated mixed-language input indexed by observed (30-second segment) counts and proportions in day-long recordings as well as parent-reported scores, in relation to infant vocal activeness (i.e., volubility) when infants were 10 and 18 months old. Results suggested infants who received a higher score or proportion of mixed input in one-on-one social contexts were less voluble. However, within contexts involving language mixing, infants who heard more words were also the ones who produced more vocalizations. These divergent associations between mixed input and infant vocal development point for a need to better understand the causal factors that drive these associations.
... In particular, studies have shown that the amount of childdirected speech (CDS) that children are exposed to during infancy and childhood has meaningful downstream effects on their language development (Hurtado et al., 2008;Mahr & Edwards, 2018;Newman et al., 2016;Ramírez-Esparza et al., 2017;Rowe, 2008Rowe, , 2012Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). Similarly, differences in bilingual language exposure predict differences in infants' and children's speech processing, speech production, and vocabulary development, suggesting that the amount of bilingual children's exposure to each of their languages explains meaningful variability in their language development (Bijeljac-Babic et al., 2012;Byers-Heinlein, 2013;Carbajal & Peperkamp, 2019;Carroll, 2017;Marchman et al., 2017;Pearson et al., 1997;Place & Hoff, 2011, 2016Potter et al., 2019;Unsworth et al., 2018). ...
... Another study found bilingual exposure effects on the receptive vocabularies of bilingual French infants aged 0;11 (Carbajal & Peperkamp, 2019). Exposure was measured with a language questionnaire and two daily diaries to note who spoke in what language with the infant every half hour throughout the day. ...
... Finally, researchers and practitioners have rarely considered the difficulty of extending parental report methodsincluding questionnaires-to populations unfamiliar with behavioral research. Caregivers with low levels of literacy, for example, might have difficulty completing language diaries or other written self-reports that have to be completed over the course of a child's day (e.g., Carbajal & Peperkamp, 2019;Place & Hoff, 2011). Similarly, in-person oral interviews (e.g., Marchman et al., 2017) may be more difficult for populations that are unfamiliar with behavioral research methods or face stigmatization for speaking one of their languages. ...
Purpose
The language that children hear early in life is associated with their speech-language outcomes. This line of research relies on naturalistic observations of children's language input, often captured with daylong audio recordings. However, the large quantity of data that daylong recordings generate requires novel analytical tools to feasibly parse thousands of hours of naturalistic speech. This study outlines a new approach to efficiently process and sample from daylong audio recordings made in two bilingual communities, Spanish–English in the United States and Quechua–Spanish in Bolivia, to derive estimates of children's language exposure.
Method
We employed a general sampling with replacement technique to efficiently estimate two key elements of children's early language environments: (a) proportion of child-directed speech (CDS) and (b) dual language exposure. Proportions estimated from random sampling of 30-s segments were compared to those from annotations over the entire daylong recording (every other segment), as well as parental report of dual language exposure.
Results
Results showed that approximately 49 min from each recording or just 7% of the overall recording was required to reach a stable proportion of CDS and bilingual exposure. In both speech communities, strong correlations were found between bilingual language estimates made using random sampling and all-day annotation techniques. A strong association was additionally found for CDS estimates in the United States, but this was weaker at the Bolivian site, where CDS was less frequent. Dual language estimates from the audio recordings did not correspond well to estimates derived from parental report collected months apart.
Conclusions
Daylong recordings offer tremendous insight into children's daily language experiences, but they will not become widely used in developmental research until data processing and annotation time substantially decrease. We show that annotation based on random sampling is a promising approach to efficiently estimate ambient characteristics from daylong recordings that cannot currently be estimated via automated methods.
... A study of language input within two days in the lives of 58 bilingual (at least 46 were likely BFLA) 10-to 12-month-olds in Paris found that many infants heard both French and one or more of 16 other languages within the same half-hour, rather than just a single language (Carbajal & Peperkamp, 2020). About half the families followed an OPOL approach. ...
... BFLA average comprehension vocabulary size in one particular language does not differ from that of monolinguals. There were no differences among bilingual and monolingual infants (average age: 11 months) in the average number of French words understood (Carbajal & Peperkamp, 2020). Dutch-French firstborn 13-month-olds (N = 31) understood as many Dutch words as 30 demographically matched Dutch-learning monolingual peers . ...
... Comprehension levels may also be affected by the input: BFLA 10-to 12month-olds who heard two languages more often in the same half-hour block of time had lower French comprehension scores than BFLA peers whose language input in each language was more separated (Carbajal & Peperkamp, 2020). No such negative effects were found for the word production of older BFLA toddlers who frequently heard their languages within the same half-hour block, however (Place & Hoff, 2016). ...
In the first decade of life, children become bilingual in different language learning environments. Many children start learning two languages from birth (Bilingual First Language Acquisition). In early childhood hitherto monolingual children start hearing a second language through day care or preschool (Early Second Language Acquisition). Yet other hitherto monolingual children in middle childhood may acquire a second language only after entering school (Second Language Acquisition). This Element explains how these different language learning settings dynamically affect bilingual children’s language learning trajectories. All children eventually learn to speak the societal language, but they often do not learn to fluently speak their non-societal language and may even stop speaking it. Children’s and families’ harmonious bilingualism is threatened if bilingual children do not develop high proficiency in both languages. Educational institutions and parental conversational practices play
a pivotal role in supporting harmonious bilingual development.
... In particular, studies have shown that the amount of childdirected speech (CDS) that children are exposed to during infancy and childhood has meaningful downstream effects on their language development (Hurtado et al., 2008;Mahr & Edwards, 2018;Newman et al., 2016;Ramírez-Esparza et al., 2017;Rowe, 2008Rowe, , 2012Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). Similarly, differences in bilingual language exposure predict differences in infants' and children's speech processing, speech production, and vocabulary development, suggesting that the amount of bilingual children's exposure to each of their languages explains meaningful variability in their language development (Bijeljac-Babic et al., 2012;Byers-Heinlein, 2013;Carbajal & Peperkamp, 2019;Carroll, 2017;Marchman et al., 2017;Pearson et al., 1997;Place & Hoff, 2011, 2016Potter et al., 2019;Unsworth et al., 2018). ...
... Another study found bilingual exposure effects on the receptive vocabularies of bilingual French infants aged 0;11 (Carbajal & Peperkamp, 2019). Exposure was measured with a language questionnaire and two daily diaries to note who spoke in what language with the infant every half hour throughout the day. ...
... Finally, researchers and practitioners have rarely considered the difficulty of extending parental report methodsincluding questionnaires-to populations unfamiliar with behavioral research. Caregivers with low levels of literacy, for example, might have difficulty completing language diaries or other written self-reports that have to be completed over the course of a child's day (e.g., Carbajal & Peperkamp, 2019;Place & Hoff, 2011). Similarly, in-person oral interviews (e.g., Marchman et al., 2017) may be more difficult for populations that are unfamiliar with behavioral research methods or face stigmatization for speaking one of their languages. ...
Purpose: The language that children hear early in life predicts their later speech-language outcomes (Hoff 2003; Weisleder & Fernald 2013). This line of research relies on naturalistic observations of children’s language input, often captured with daylong audio recordings. But the large quantity of data that daylong recordings generate requires novel analytical tools to feasibly parse thousands of hours of naturalistic speech. This study outlines a workflow to efficiently process and sample from daylong audio recordings made in two bilingual communities:Spanish-English in the United States and Quechua-Spanish in Bolivia.Method: We employed a general sampling with replacement technique to efficiently estimate two key elements of children’s early language environments: 1) proportion of child-directed speech and 2) dual language exposure. Proportions estimated from random sampling of 30-second segments were compared to those from annotations over the entire daylong recording (every-other-segment), as well as parental report.Results: Results showed that approximately 49 minutes from each recording, or just 7% of the overall recording, were required to reach a stable proportion of child-directed speech and bilingual exposure. In both speech communities, strong correlations were found between bilingual language estimates made using random sampling and all-day annotation techniques. A strong relationship was additionally found for child-directed speech estimates in the United States, but this was weaker at the Bolivian site, where child-directed speech was less frequent. Furthermore, dual language estimates from the daylong audio recordings did not correspond to estimates derived from parental report.Conclusions: Random sampling is a valid method to estimate ambient characteristics from daylong recordings. However, caution should be taken when interpreting estimates of low-frequency categories and practitioners might consider collecting multiple daylong recordings to accurately estimate characteristics of children’s language exposure.
... Despite this apparent ease, developmental evidence shows that complex brain systems and processes supporting language comprehension emerge between perinatal stages and around three years of age, and become language-selective between birth and the start of primary school (for reviews see Gervain, 2015;Kuhl, 2004;Skeide & Friederici, 2016). However, little is known about how these neurocognitive processes evolve and mature during childhood as a function of language exposure or experience, two essential contributors to language development (e.g., Carbajal & Peperkamp, 2020;Gámez et al., 2019;Gathercole & Thomas, 2005;Pearson et al., 1997;Thordardottir, 2011). ...
... Both lexico-semantic and syntactic knowledge, whose development is tightly related to accumulated language experience (Carbajal & Peperkamp, 2020;Oller et al., 2007;Paradis & Genesee, 1996;Pearson et al., 1997), have been linked to the efficiency of cortical oscillatory mechanisms for speech processing. In monolingual children, Panda et al. (2020) showed that lexico-semantic (vocabulary) knowledge was linked to the synchronization between languagerelated brain areas through cortical oscillatory activity during continuous speech listening, although they did not assess CTS. ...
Despite the relevance of the cortical tracking of speech for the development of speech perception skills, no study to date has explored whether and how it is shaped by language experience and exposure. In this study we expand the current theories of cortex-speech tracking by showing that the cortical tracking of speech in unbalanced bilingual children is modulated by language exposure. We recorded electroencephalography in 35 Basque-Spanish bilingual children (6 y.o.) with a markedly unbalanced bilingual profile (>70 % exposure to Basque; <30 % to Spanish) while they listened to continuous speech in each of their languages. We assessed their cortical tracking of speech at the acoustic temporal (speech envelope), lexical (lexical frequency), and semantic (sentence-level semantic distance) levels. Phase alignment between the speech envelope and the EEG activity (speech-brain coherence) in the delta frequency band (0.5 - 1.5 Hz) was significant and similar in both languages. Interestingly, mTRF modeling showed that the cortical encoding of the speech envelope in the language with the least exposure was the most robust. Moreover, mTRF modeling showed that children had a more sensitive cortical tracking of semantic information in their most experienced language. Lastly, only for the language with dominant exposure, the cortex-speech tracking of the envelope was linked to the phonological abilities, while their cortical tracking of lexico-semantic information predicted their vocabulary knowledge. Our findings inform the developmental theories by showing that the cortical tracking of acoustic temporal and lexico-semantic speech features depends on the accumulated experience within a language during the early years of language acquisition.
... To separate and discriminate languages, infants who are simultaneously learning dual language from birth have shown advances in phonetic sensitivities and initiated differences in speech perception and word recognition skills (Werker and Byers-Heinlein, 2008;Werker et al., 2009;Sebastián-Gallés et al., 2012;Singh et al., 2018;Höhle et al., 2020;Kalashnikova and Carreiras, 2022). Other observational studies also provide detailed characteristics of linguistic input in early childhood and reveal the variations in the language learning context with respect to the amount of exposure in each language, the similarity between two languages, the speech type, parent's language proficiency, and so forth (De Houwer, 2007;Thordardottir, 2011;Ramírez-Esparza et al., 2014, 2017De Houwer et al., 2018;Carbajal and Peperkamp, 2020;Orena et al., 2020). ...
... In the domain of language development, there is an established line of work focusing on language input-how daily bilingual exposure influences linguistic experiences (De Houwer, 2007;Rowe, 2012;Cartmill et al., 2013;Ramírez-Esparza et al., 2014, 2017Carroll, 2017;De Houwer et al., 2018). Researchers typically use language diaries to record numerous conversations across a variety of contexts (e.g., Huttenlocher et al., 2010;Place and Hoff, 2011;Rowe, 2012;Gilkerson et al., 2017;Carbajal and Peperkamp, 2020) and/or count the number of words and assess the word types, sentence complexity, and contexts in which words and sentences are used by parental questionnaires (e.g., De Houwer, 2007Scheele et al., 2010;Byers-Heinlein, 2013;Unsworth et al., 2019). ...
A growing number of children in the United States are exposed to multiple languages at home from birth. However, relatively little is known about the early process of word learning—how words are mapped to the referent in their child-centered learning experiences. The present study defined parental input operationally as the integrated and multimodal learning experiences as an infant engages with his/her parent in an interactive play session with objects. By using a head-mounted eye tracking device, we recorded visual scenes from the infant’s point of view, along with the parent’s social input with respect to gaze, labeling, and actions of object handling. Fifty-one infants and toddlers (aged 6–18 months) from an English monolingual or a diverse bilingual household were recruited to observe the early multimodal learning experiences in an object play session. Despite that monolingual parents spoke more and labeled more frequently relative to bilingual parents, infants from both language groups benefit from a comparable amount of socially coordinated experiences where parents name the object while the object is looked at by the infant. Also, a sequential path analysis reveals multiple social coordinated pathways that facilitate infant object looking. Specifically, young children’s attention to the referent objects is directly influenced by parent’s object handling. These findings point to the new approach to early language input and how multimodal learning experiences are coordinated socially for young children growing up with monolingual and bilingual learning contexts.
... Language exposure is a key factor that can determine language proficiency level among learners depending on quality and quantity of input which plays an important role in language acquisition specifically word frequency (Carbajal and Peperkamp, 2019). Basically, the majority of difficulties in learning English language along with speaking fluency are traced to the lack of target language exposure beyond school walls (Al-zoubi, 2018). ...
Individuals show different levels of language proficiency that appears mostly in their lexical ability. A key factor of this variance is language exposure, however the quality and quantity are main determiners. For this purpose, this research examines the impact of diverse sources of the target language exposure on facilitating vocabulary acquisition in a non-native speaking community. The current study has been designed using the qualitative method approach to collect data from eight EFL learners enrolled in English department, Faculty of Art, Misrata University through semi-structured interviews. Further, the data have been analysed using thematic analysis. The research findings have revealed that communicative activities such as watching TV, listening to music, radio and podcast, reading, social media, video games, interaction with other speakers e.t. as informal sources of language exposure, can utterly improve vocabulary knowledge. Since, they provide a convenient environment and flexible amount of input. By contrast, classrooms instructive nature contradicts with the incidental mechanism of vocabulary acquisition and results in a good knowledge of grammatical structures in most cases. According to the participants, vocabulary development is tied to comprehensible input exposure beyond the formal setting. Based on the results, the incidental nature of vocabulary development requires informal exposure to the target language input. Recommendations of the study are: language teaching materials should be linked to informal language contact out of classroom, and further researches may include theories concerning vocabulary acquisition in relation to the practical side of the classroom.
... The Language Exposure Questionnaire ('LEQ'), a commonly used tool with bilingual families, was used to quantify percentage of bilinguals' language exposure (Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 1997;Carbajal & Peperkamp, 2020;Kalashnikova, Pejovic & Carreiras, 2020;Potter, Fourakis, Morin-Lessard, Byers-Heinlein & Lew-Williams, 2019). The LEQ is a structured interview that quantifies a child's early exposure to two languages. ...
Bilingual infants rely differently than monolinguals on facial information, such as lip patterns, to differentiate their native languages. This may explain, at least in part, why young monolinguals and bilinguals show differences in social attention. For example, in the first year, bilinguals attend faster and more often to static faces over non-faces than do monolinguals (Mercure et al., 2018). However, the developmental trajectories of these differences are unknown. In this pre-registered study, data were collected from 15-to 18-month-old monolinguals (English) and bilinguals (English and another language) to test whether group differences in face-looking behaviour persist into the second year. We predicted that bilinguals would orient more rapidly and more often to static faces than monolinguals. Results supported the first but not the second hypothesis. This suggests that, even into the second year of life, toddlers' rapid visual orientation to static social stimuli is sensitive to early language experience.
... One solution to using a standardized binary categorization would be to use continuous measures of bilingual exposure. In our review, only a handful of studies included exploratory analyses treating bilingual exposure as a continuous variable (see Carbajal & Peperkamp, 2020;Tsang et al., 2018). ...
Aims and objectives
The aim of this manuscript is to provide an overview of the population and languages studied and the methods and practices surrounding the definition of bilingualism in children below age 3.
Methodology
A quantitative descriptive scoping review
Data and analysis
From 530 articles, we identified 127 papers (167 studies) that met our predefined criteria, of which 144 studies defined their bilingual population.
Findings/conclusions
The samples investigated were predominantly western in geographical origin and languages. Percent exposure was the most common method to measure bilingualism among infants and young children, with 20% and 25% the most used cutoffs as the minimum requirement for children’s second language. We also analyzed the predictive value of these cutoffs on the likelihood that studies reported a significant difference between monolinguals and bilinguals. The stricter the inclusion requirement for bilinguals was, the higher the odds of a study to report a difference between monolingual and bilingual children. We conclude that a lack of uniformity of definition in the field may be one factor that predicts whether or not significant differences are reported.
Originality
This scoping review provides developmental researchers with a unique overview of the different practices used in the field to characterize bilingual and monolingual infants/toddlers. The reported results can be used as preliminary evidence for the field to report and carefully formulate how to categorize monolinguals and bilingual infants.
Significance/implications
As globalization continues to foster migration and intercultural exchange, it is essential for developmental researchers to diversify their samples and language groups. We highly encourage researchers to carefully document the definitions and rationale for all their language groups and to consider analyzing the impact of bilingualism both from a categorical and continuous approach.
... For monolingual children, word frequency and syntactic complexity in the speech that they hear influences their language skills. The same can be said for bilingual children; however, for bilingual children in bilingual environments, the language exposure varies more across contexts (Carbajal & Peperkamp, 2019). ...
The purpose of this study is to explore L1 versus L2 (or English-only versus Spanish-only) language use during play activities with their children from the perspective of the immigrant parent. Nine primarily Spanish-speaking parents of typically developing children 12-46 months of age were interviewed after completing play activities with their children in English and in Spanish. To develop participant language proficiency profiles, descriptive data were collected and analysed using clinical language tools. Data on participants' perceptions of language were collected using semi-structured interviewing and analysed using thematic analysis procedures. Participant-child forced language interaction data were collected during play activities and analysed using linguistic analysis software. One major theme (forced English as a barrier to authentic communication) and three subthemes (child did not understand parent, parent felt uncomfortable and code-switching) were found based on their experiences. The results from this study show that these Spanish-speaking parents who are learning English feel more comfortable speaking to their children in their native language. The lack of comfort and proficiency in English had a negative impact on parents' language output in quality and quantity which has implications for the children's overall language exposure. The information obtained from this study may be used to educate professionals working with Spanish-speaking parents that are learning a second language.
... One solution to using a standardized binary categorization would be to use continuous measures of bilingual exposure. In our review, only a handful of studies included exploratory analyses treating bilingual exposure as a continuous variable (see Carbajal & Peperkamp, 2020;Tsang et al., 2018). ...
Aims and Objectives
The aim of this manuscript is to provide an overview of the population and languages studied and the methods and practices surrounding the definition of bilingualism in children below age three.MethodologyA quantitative descriptive scoping reviewData and AnalysisFrom 530 articles, we identified 127 papers (167 studies) that met our predefined criteria, of which 144 studies defined their bilingual population.Findings/Conclusions
The samples investigated were predominantly western in geographical origin and languages. Percent exposure was the most common method to measure bilingualism among infants and young children, with 20% and 25% the most used cutoffs as the minimum requirement for children's second language. We also analyzed the predictive value of these cutoffs on the likelihood that studies reported a significant difference between monolinguals and bilinguals. The stricter the inclusion requirement for bilinguals was, the higher the odds of a study to report a difference between monolingual and bilingual children. We conclude that a lack of uniformity of definition in the field may be one factor that predicts whether or not significant differences are reported.OriginalityThis scoping review provides developmental researchers with a unique overview of the different practices used in the field to characterize bilingual and monolingual infants/toddlers. The reported results can be used as preliminary evidence for the field to report and carefully formulate how to categorize monolinguals and bilingual infants.Significance/ImplicationsAs globalization continues to foster migration and intercultural exchange, it is essential for developmental researchers to diversify their samples and language groups. We highly encourage researchers to carefully document the definitions and rationale for all their language groups and to consider analyzing the impact of bilingualism both from a categorical and continuous approach.
... Using redundant, predictive cues may be a way to direct attention and improve the differentiation between overlapping systems of knowledge. For example, there are two recommendations, among others, for parents raising bilingual children: One Person-One Language, in which each parent speaks to the child in a different language, and Minority Language at Home, in which the family speaks the minority language at home, and the child speaks the dominant language outside the home (Byers-Heinlein, 2013;Carbajal & Peperkamp, 2020;De Houwer, 2007). Common to both of these recommendations is that the contexts (i.e., parent or location) predictably determine the language that will be used just as the contextual cues predicted the category that was learned in the current study. ...
As children learn words, they develop attentional biases that support word learning but are hard to overcome. Predictive contextual cues may help increase attention to non-biased, or overlooked, features. This study sought to direct 3-year-old children’s attention to texture, a feature typically overlooked when categorizing new words early in development. During training, half of the children learned novel shape (a biased feature) and texture (an overlooked feature) categories with predictive cues, and half of the children learned the same categories with non-predictive cues. Children were then tested in a categorization task with novel texture words. The cues were present at test in Experiment 1 (N = 63) and absent in Experiment 2 (N = 37). Children in the predictive cue condition consistently chose the texture match more often than children in the non-predictive cue condition. These results inform our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that may contribute to word learning.
Purpose:
Measuring language input, especially for infants growing up in bilingual environments, is challenging. Although the ways to measure input have expanded rapidly in recent years, there are many unresolved issues. In this study, we compared different measurement units and sampling methods used to estimate bilingual input in naturalistic daylong recordings.
Method:
We used the Language Environment Analysis system to obtain and process naturalistic daylong recordings from 21 French-English bilingual families with an infant at 10 and 18 months of age. We examined global and context-specific input estimates and their relation with infant vocal activeness (i.e., volubility) when input was indexed by different units (adult word counts, speech duration, 30-s segment counts) and using different sampling methods (every-other-segment, top-segment).
Results:
Input measures indexed by different units were strongly and positively correlated with each other and yielded similar results regarding their relation with infant volubility. As for sampling methods, sampling every other 30-s segment was representative of the entire corpus. However, sampling the top segments with the densest input was less representative and yielded different results regarding their relation with infant volubility.
Conclusions:
How well the input that a child receives throughout a day is portrayed by a selected sample and correlates with the child's vocal activeness depends on the choice of input units and sampling methods. Different input units appear to generate consistent results, while caution should be taken when choosing sampling methods.
Supplemental material:
https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.22335688.
Although understanding the role of the environment is central to language acquisition theory, rarely has this been studied for children's phonetic development, and receptive and expressive language experiences in the environment are not distinguished. This last distinction may be crucial for child speech production in particular, because production requires coordination of low-level speech-motor planning with high-level linguistic knowledge. In this study, the role of the environment is evaluated in a novel way-by studying phonetic development in a bilingual community undergoing rapid language shift. This sociolinguistic context provides a naturalistic gradient of the amount of children's exposure to two languages and the ratio of expressive to receptive experiences. A large-scale child language corpus encompassing over 500 hours of naturalistic South Bolivian Quechua and Spanish speech was efficiently annotated for children's and their caregivers' bilingual language use. These estimates were correlated with children's patterns in a series of speech production tasks. The role of the environment varied by outcome: children's expressive language experience best predicted their performance on a coarticulation-morphology measure, while their receptive experience predicted performance on a lower-level measure of vowel variability. Overall these bilingual exposure effects suggest a pathway for children's role in language change whereby language shift can result in different learning outcomes within a single speech community. Appropriate ways to model language exposure in development are discussed.
Language mixing is common in bilingual children's learning environments. Here, we investigated effects of language mixing on children's learning of new words. We tested two groups of 3-year-old bilinguals: French–English (Experiment 1) and Spanish–English (Experiment 2). Children were taught two novel words, one in single-language sentences (“Look! Do you see the dog on the teelo?”) and one in mixed-language sentences with a mid-sentence language switch (“Look! Do you see the chien/perro on the walem?”). During the learning phase, children correctly identified novel targets when hearing both single-language and mixed-language sentences. However, at test, French–English bilinguals did not successfully recognize the word encountered in mixed-language sentences. Spanish–English bilinguals failed to recognize either word, which underscores the importance of examining multiple bilingual populations. This research suggests that language mixing may sometimes hinder children's encoding of novel words that occur downstream, but leaves open several possible underlying mechanisms.
This chapter outlines a holistic framework for approaching the study of language input to children under age 6 acquiring oral languages in bilingual settings. After 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 settings and media use, and interactional style. The chapter addresses methodological 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.
Purpose:
The aim of this study was to develop the Language Exposure Assessment Tool (LEAT) and to examine its cross-linguistic validity, reliability, and utility. The LEAT is a computerized interview-style assessment that requests parents to estimate language exposure. The LEAT yields an automatic calculation of relative language exposure and captures qualitative aspects of early language experience.
Method:
Relative language exposure as reported on the LEAT and vocabulary size at 17 months of age were measured in a group of bilingual language learners with varying levels of exposure to French and English or Spanish and English.
Results:
The LEAT demonstrates high internal consistency and criterion validity. In addition, the LEAT's calculation of relative language exposure explains variability in vocabulary size above a single overall parent estimate.
Conclusions:
The LEAT is a valid and efficient tool for characterizing early language experience across cultural settings and levels of language exposure. The LEAT could be a useful tool in clinical contexts to aid in determining whether assessment and intervention should be conducted in one or more languages.
This paper compared the vocabulary size of a group of 250 bilinguals aged 24–36 months acquiring six different language pairs using an analogous tool, and attempted to identify factors that influence vocabulary sizes and ultimately place children at risk for language delay. Each research group used adaptations of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories: Words and Sentences and a specially designed developmental and language background questionnaire to gather information on risk factors for language impairment, demographic and language exposure variables. The results showed a wide range in vocabulary development which could be somewhat attributed to mothers’ education status, parental concerns about language development and amount of exposure to the second language. We looked at those children performing below the 10th and above the 90th percentile to determine what factors were related to their vocabulary size. Features of the entire group of lower performing children were fewer than 50 words and the absence of two-word combinations by 24 months, lower levels of parental education and parental concerns about language development. The implications for identifying bilingual children at risk for language impairment as well as the language enrichment that might be needed for young bilinguals are outlined.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13670050.2016.1179256
This study investigated the role of language exposure in vocabulary acquisition in Irish, a threatened minority language in Ireland which is usually acquired with English in a bilingual context. Using a bilingual Irish–English adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories) [Fenson, L., V. A. Marchman, D. J. Thal, P. S. Dale, J. S. Reznick, and E. Bates. 2007. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. 2nd ed. Baltimore: Brookes], longitudinal parent report data were collected from 34 children (19 girls and 15 boys) at 4-monthly intervals, resulting in 61 data points between the ages of 17–36 months. Language exposure estimates indicated that while the caregivers ‘always’ spoke Irish to the children, both languages were used in most households, with/among siblings and extended family. The children’s vocabulary indicated that they were Irish-dominant in this age range, with more Irish words than English for all vocabulary categories. The analysis also showed no difference in Irish vocabulary scores between children who were ‘usually’ exposed to Irish compared to those with lower exposure rates to Irish. However, there was a significant effect for caregivers’ reported use of English on children’s English scores. The results are discussed in terms of the language input needed to maintain an endangered language and factors to take into account for establishing good estimates of language exposure in a minority language context.
In research on language development by bilingual children, the early language environment is commonly characterized in terms of the relative amount of exposure a child gets to each language based on parent report. Little is known about how absolute measures of child-directed speech in two languages relate to language growth. In this study of 3-year-old Spanish-English bilinguals (n = 18), traditional parent-report estimates of exposure were compared to measures of the number of Spanish and English words children heard during naturalistic audio recordings. While the two estimates were moderately correlated, observed numbers of child-directed words were more consistently predictive of children's processing speed and standardized test performance, even when controlling for reported proportion of exposure. These findings highlight the importance of caregiver engagement in bilingual children's language outcomes in both of the languages they are learning.
This study examines the actual amount of maternal language input received by young bilingual versus matched monolingual children. All mothers had always addressed their children in Dutch. The bilingual children in addition heard French from other caregivers since they were born. Analyses are based on video recordings of mother-child interaction when children were 13 and 20 months old. There was considerable interindividual variation amongst mothers in how much they talked with their children, regardless of whether mothers were part of a bilingual family or not. Based on analyses of 13 measures of input frequency, no differences emerged in the quantity of language input between mothers in bilingual and monolingual families. A number of bilingual children heard more Dutch from their mothers than children in monolingual families did. This study, likely the first to compare mothers in matched bilingual and monolingual families and to empirically compare maternal input, thus finds no evidence of reduced (maternal) language input for bilingual children. Instead, the absolute amount of maternal language input varied considerably for both bilingual and monolingual children. The study of this variation holds great potential for a better understanding of the underpinnings of bilingual children's language development.
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The articles in this special issue provide a complex picture of acquisition in bilinguals in which the factors that contribute to patterns of performance in bilingual children's two languages are myriad and diverse. The processes and contours of development in bilingual children are influenced, not only by the quantity, quality, and contexts of input, but by whether the child hears monolingual or bilingual speech, who is the source of that speech, the proportion of speakers of the heritage language in the community, the child's birth order in the family, the family's SES, the timing and the child's stage of development, profile effects in performance, and characteristics of the languages being learned. One constant across the research is the finding that the majority language fairs well in development, while the minority language is threatened. The insights gained are relevant to future work on bilingual children, whether of a theoretical or applied focus.
Growth modeling was applied to monolingual (N=26) and bilingual (N=28) word learning from 14 to 36 months. Level and growth rate of vocabulary were lower for Finnish-Russian bilinguals than for Finnish monolinguals. Processing of Finnish speech sounds at 7 but not at 11 months predicted level, but not growth rate of vocabulary in both Finnish and Russian; this relationship was the same for monolinguals
and bilinguals. The bilinguals’ two vocabularies developed differently, showing no acceleration in Russian, the minority language. Even though the bilinguals progressed more slowly in each home language, they were learning at least as many new words as the monolinguals when Finnish and Russian vocabularies were counted together.
In Chapter 8, the focus was on the acquisition of a particularly English morpho-syntactic construct. In this chapter, we turn to Spanish and examine a structure particular to Spanish and not shared by English – grammatical gender. As noted in Chapter 8, languages generally fall into two major types, those that have grammatical gender and those that have natural gender. In a natural gender language, like English, nouns that refer to humans and animate beings are sometimes distinguished on the basis of the gender of their referents. The distinction may be a matter of a choice between completely different lexical items – e.g., in English boy refers to males, girl to females, or it may be a matter of a morphological distinction – e.g., in English mister (for males) and mistress (for females) are based on the same stem. Modifiers that are used with these nouns generally do not take distinct shapes on the basis of gender (e.g., we use the and small and happy with both words referring to males and words referring to females); pronouns that are co-referential with these nouns may be marked for gender, but that gender is taken from the natural gender of the referent, as is generally the case for pronouns in a natural gender language (see Gathercole, 1989) for discussion of unmarked he, however). Nouns that do not refer to animate beings (e.g., sand, water, chair), and even many nouns that do (e.g., teacher, cat), are generally not specified in any way for gender. (For the latter type, pronoun choice may still depend on the gender of the referent, however.) Contrast this with a grammatical gender language, like Spanish. In such a language, nouns are categorized into generally two or three classes, according to the types and forms of modifiers they may co-occur with. The use of a noun of a particular gender dictates the choice of forms – either lexically or morphologically distinct – of, e.g., articles and adjectives modifying that noun.
Background:
Bilingual children are under-referred due to an ostensible expectation that they lag behind their monolingual peers in their English acquisition. The recommendations of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) state that bilingual children should be assessed in both the languages known by the children. However, despite these recommendations, a majority of speech and language professionals report that they assess bilingual children only in English as bilingual children come from a wide array of language backgrounds and standardized language measures are not available for the majority of these. Moreover, even when such measures do exist, they are not tailored for bilingual children.
Aims:
It was asked whether a cut-off exists in the proportion of exposure to English at which one should expect a bilingual toddler to perform as well as a monolingual on a test standardized for monolingual English-speaking children.
Methods & procedures:
Thirty-five bilingual 2;6-year-olds exposed to British English plus an additional language and 36 British monolingual toddlers were assessed on the auditory component of the Preschool Language Scale, British Picture Vocabulary Scale and an object-naming measure. All parents completed the Oxford Communicative Development Inventory (Oxford CDI) and an exposure questionnaire that assessed the proportion of English in the language input. Where the CDI existed in the bilingual's additional language, these data were also collected.
Outcomes & results:
Hierarchical regression analyses found the proportion of exposure to English to be the main predictor of the performance of bilingual toddlers. Bilingual toddlers who received 60% exposure to English or more performed like their monolingual peers on all measures. K-means cluster analyses and Levene variance tests confirmed the estimated English exposure cut-off at 60% for all language measures. Finally, for one additional language for which we had multiple participants, additional language CDI production scores were significantly inversely related to the amount of exposure to English.
Conclusions & implications:
Typically developing 2;6-year-olds who are bilingual in English and an additional language and who hear English 60% of the time or more, perform equivalently to their typically developing monolingual peers.
Maximum likelihood or restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimates of the
parameters in linear mixed-effects models can be determined using the lmer
function in the lme4 package for R. As for most model-fitting functions in R,
the model is described in an lmer call by a formula, in this case including
both fixed- and random-effects terms. The formula and data together determine a
numerical representation of the model from which the profiled deviance or the
profiled REML criterion can be evaluated as a function of some of the model
parameters. The appropriate criterion is optimized, using one of the
constrained optimization functions in R, to provide the parameter estimates. We
describe the structure of the model, the steps in evaluating the profiled
deviance or REML criterion, and the structure of classes or types that
represents such a model. Sufficient detail is included to allow specialization
of these structures by users who wish to write functions to fit specialized
linear mixed models, such as models incorporating pedigrees or smoothing
splines, that are not easily expressible in the formula language used by lmer.
The Spanish-language MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (S-CDIs) are well-established parent report tools for assessing the language development of Spanish-speaking children under 3 years. Here, we introduce the short-form versions of the S-CDIs (SFI and SFII), offered as alternatives to the long forms for screening purposes or in applications requiring a less-demanding instrument. Norming data (SFI: n = 601; SFII: n = 2,534) from diverse populations in Mexico are described. Developmental trends, gender differences, and socioeconomic status effects are reported that parallel those for the long forms. An additional small-scale study (n = 62) demonstrates strong convergence between responses on the long and the short forms. These results provide evidence that the S-CDI SFs have promise for a range of clinical and research applications.
Language skills in young bilingual children are highly varied as a result of the variability in their language experiences, making it difficult for speech-language pathologists to differentiate language disorder from language difference in bilingual children. Understanding the sources of variability in bilingual contexts and the resulting variability in children's skills will help improve language assessment practices by speech-language pathologists. In this article, we review literature on bilingual first language development for children under 5 years of age. We describe the rate of development in single and total language growth, we describe effects of quantity of input and quality of input on growth, and we describe effects of family composition on language input and language growth in bilingual children. We provide recommendations for language assessment of young bilingual children and consider implications for optimizing children's dual language development.
Infants differ substantially in their rates of language growth, and slow growth predicts later academic difficulties. In this study, we explored how the amount of speech directed to infants in Spanish-speaking families low in socioeconomic status influenced the development of children's skill in real-time language processing and vocabulary learning. All-day recordings of parent-infant interactions at home revealed striking variability among families in how much speech caregivers addressed to their child. Infants who experienced more child-directed speech became more efficient in processing familiar words in real time and had larger expressive vocabularies by the age of 24 months, although speech simply overheard by the child was unrelated to vocabulary outcomes. Mediation analyses showed that the effect of child-directed speech on expressive vocabulary was explained by infants' language-processing efficiency, which suggests that richer language experience strengthens processing skills that facilitate language growth.
Two separate studies examined older siblings' influence on the language exposure and language development of U.S.-born toddlers who were being raised in bilingual homes. The participants in Study 1 were 60 children between 16 and 30 months who had heard English and another language at home from birth; 26 had older siblings and 34 did not. The participants in Study 2 were 27 children, assessed at 22 and 30 months, who had heard English and Spanish from birth; 14 had school aged older siblings and 13 did not. Both studies found that older siblings used English more in talking to the toddlers than did other household members and that toddlers with older siblings were more advanced in English language development. Study 2 also found that the presence of a school aged older sibling increased mothers' use of English with their toddlers and that toddlers without a school aged older sibling were more advanced in Spanish than the toddlers with a school aged older sibling. These findings contribute to a picture of the complex processes that shape language use in bilingual homes and cause variability in young children's bilingual development.
This research revealed both similarities and striking differences in early language proficiency among infants from a broad range of advantaged and disadvantaged families. English-learning infants (n = 48) were followed longitudinally from 18 to 24 months, using real-time measures of spoken language processing. The first goal was to track developmental changes in processing efficiency in relation to vocabulary learning in this diverse sample. The second goal was to examine differences in these crucial aspects of early language development in relation to family socioeconomic status (SES). The most important findings were that significant disparities in vocabulary and language processing efficiency were already evident at 18 months between infants from higher- and lower-SES families, and by 24 months there was a 6-month gap between SES groups in processing skills critical to language development.
Examines the role of exposure to speech in children's early vocabulary growth. It is generally assumed that individual differences in vocabulary depend, in large part, on variations in learning capacity. However, variations in exposure have not been systematically explored. In this study vocabulary growth rates are characterized for each of 22 children by using data obtained at several time points from 14 to 26 mo. A substantial relation between individual differences in vocabulary acquisition and variations in the amount that particular mothers speak to their children was found. It is argued that the relation between amount of parent speech and vocabulary growth reflects parent effects on the child, rather than child-ability effects on the parent or hereditary factors. It was also found that gender is an important factor in rate of vocabulary growth. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This paper has as its starting point the assumption that in acquiring two languages from birth, bilingual children separate their grammars from very early on. This does not, however, exclude cross-linguistic influence – the possible influence of one language on the other. The main focus of the paper is on the acquisition of syntax in a generative framework. We argue that cross-linguistic influence can occur if (1) an interface level between two modules of grammar is involved, and (2) the two languages overlap at the surface level. We show that both conditions hold for object drop, but not for root infinitives. Root infinitives satisfy the first condition: they involve the interface between syntax and pragmatics. However, they do not satisfy the second condition. Therefore, we expect cross-linguistic influence to occur only in the domain of object drop and not in the domain of root infinitives. Comparing the development of the two phenomena in a bilingual Dutch–French and a German–Italian child to the development in monolingual children, we show that this prediction is borne out by our data. Moreover, this confirms the hypothesis that cross-linguistic influence is due to language internal factors and not to language external factors such as language dominance: the periods during which we observe influence in the domain of object drop and non-influence in the domain of root infinitives are identical.
The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) are a pair of widely used
parent-report instruments for assessing communicative skills in infants and toddlers. This report
describes short-form versions of the CDIs and their development, summarizes newly available
normative data and psychometric properties of the instruments, and discusses research and
clinical applications. The infant short form (Level I, for 8- to 18-month-olds) contains an
89-word checklist for vocabulary comprehension and production. The two parallel versions of
the toddler short form (Level II, Forms A and B, for 16- to 30-month-olds) each contain a
100-word vocabulary production checklist and a question about word combinations. The forms
may also be useful with developmentally delayed children beyond the specified age ranges.
Copies of the short forms and the normative tables appear in the appendices.
This study explores the extent to which bilingual speakers in stable bilingual communities become fully bilingual in their two community languages. Growing evidence shows that in bilingual communities in which one language is very dominant, acquisition of the dominant language may be quite unproblematic across sub-groups, while acquisition of the minority language can be hampered under conditions of reduced input. In Wales, children are exposed to both English and Welsh from an early age, either in the home or at school, or both. The data reported here indicate that regardless of home language background, speakers develop equivalent, mature command of English, but that command of Welsh is directly correlated with the level of input in Welsh in the home and at school. Furthermore, maintenance of Welsh in adulthood may be contingent on continued exposure to the language. The data have implications for theories of bilingual acquisition in stable versus immigrant bilingual communities, for optimal conditions for bringing up bilingual children, and for theories of critical periods of acquisition.
The bilingual child is seen as a unique source of information about the relation between input and intake. The strength of the association between language exposure estimates and vocabulary learning was examined for 25 simultaneous bilingual infants (ages 8 to 30 months) with differing patterns of exposure to the languages being learned. Using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories, standardized parent report forms in English and Spanish, the percentage of all words that were known in each language was calculated and then plotted against the estimates of language input (also in percentages). A significant correlation was found, r(25)= .82, p < .001. The correlation was also strong when examined point-by-point, even for children whose language environments changed by more than 20%; between observations, although it was not reliable at lower levels of exposure to Spanish. Especially for children with less input in the minority language, the factors which appeared to affect the strength of the association between input and amount learned in a language are discussed.
Is parental language mixing related to vocabulary acquisition in bilingual infants and children? Bilingual parents (who spoke English and another language; n = 181) completed the Language Mixing Scale questionnaire, a new self-report measure that assesses how frequently parents use words from two different languages in the same sentence, such as borrowing words from another language or code switching between two languages in the same sentence. Concurrently, English vocabulary size was measured in the bilingual children of these parents. Most parents reported regular language mixing in interactions with their child. Increased rates of parental language mixing were associated with significantly smaller comprehension vocabularies in 1.5-year-old bilingual infants, and marginally smaller production vocabularies in 2-year-old bilingual children. Exposure to language mixing might obscure cues that facilitate young bilingual children's separation of their languages and could hinder the functioning of learning mechanisms that support the early growth of their vocabularies.
RÉSUMÉ : Adaptations françaises des versions courtes des inventaires du développement com-municatif de MacArthur-Bates Cette étude longitudinale porte sur le développement précoce du français à 12, 18 et 24 mois chez des enfants français, suisses, belges et luxembourgeois. Trois questionnaires parentaux courts visant à évaluer l'acquisition des gestes, du vocabulaire réceptif et productif ainsi que l'émergence de la grammaire ont été créés avant d'être administrés à une population de 400 mères. La construction des questionnaires, les questionnaires eux-mêmes, la collecte de données ainsi que les étalonnages sont décrits en fonction de l'âge et du sexe des enfants évalués dans l'étude. ABSTRACT: French adaptations of short versions of MacArthur-Bates communicative inven -tories This study investigates early language acquisition in French-acquiring children at 12, 18 and 24 months in four French-speaking countries. Three short parental reports designed to assess young children's communicative gestures, receptive and productive vocabulary as well as grammar emer-gence were created and administered to 400 mothers. This study describes the questionnaires, their development, gives information about data collection and presents norming data according to age and sex of evaluated children.
This article reports on a study that addresses the following question: why do some children exposed to two languages front early on fail to speak those two languages'? Questionnaire data were collected in 1.899 families in which at least one of the parents spoke a language other than the majority language. Each questionnaire asked about the home language use of a family consisting of at least one parent and one child between the ages of 6 and 10 years old. The results show that the children in these families all spoke the majority language, but that minority language use was not universal. Differences in Parental language input patterns used at home correlated with differences in child minority language use. Home input patterns where both parents used the minority language and where at most one parent spoke the majority language had a high chance of success. The "one parent-one language" strategy did not provide a necessary nor Sufficient input condition. Implications for bilingual families are discussed.
This study tested the impact of child-directed language input on language development in Spanish–English bilingual infants (N = 25, 11- and 14-month-olds from the Seattle metropolitan area), across languages and independently for each language, controlling for socioeconomic status. Language input was characterized by social interaction variables, defined in terms of speech style (“parentese” vs. standard speech) and social context (one-on-one vs. group). Correlations between parentese one-on-one and productive vocabulary at 24 months (n = 18) were found across languages and in each language independently. Differences are highlighted between previously published monolingual samples, which used the same methods as the current study of bilingual infants. The results also suggest cultural effects on language input and language development in bilingual and bicultural infants.
This study examines the challenges of minority language transmission in exogamous families in a society where linguistic and cultural homogeneity still prevails. Specifically, it investigates the macro and micro ideological influences that lead multilingual migrant mothers in Japan to speak Japanese to their children. Interview data with six Thai mothers revealed that political influences made them emphasize the learning of Japanese. Economic factors led to the mothers’ valorization of Japanese, and even English, and lackadaisical efforts toward developing their children’s Thai. Sociocultural influences contributed to their practice of speaking Japanese to their children in front of Japanese speakers. The mothers’ childrearing experiences also affected their language practices. Their perception that Thai exposure delayed their older children’s Japanese development led them to use more Japanese to their younger children. The mothers’ limited use of Thai led to a lack of comprehension and low production of Thai by their children.
Tools for performing model selection and model averaging. Automated model selection through subsetting the maximum model, with optional constraints for model inclusion. Model parameter and prediction averaging based on model weights derived from information criteria (AICc and alike) or custom model weighting schemes.
[Please do not request the full text - it is an R package. The up-to-date manual is available from CRAN].
An important aspect of Family Language Policy in bilingual families is parental language choice. Little is known about the continuity in parental language choice and the factors affecting it. This longitudinal study explores maternal language choice over time. Thirty-one bilingual mothers provided reports of what language(s) they spoke with their children. Mother–child interactions were videotaped when children were pre-verbal (5M), producing words in two languages (20M), and fluent speakers (53M). All children had heard two languages from birth in the home. Most mothers reported addressing children in the same single language. Observational data confirmed mothers’ use of mainly a single language in interactions with their children, but also showed the occasional use of the other language in over half the sample when children were 20 months. Once children were 53 months mothers again used only the same language they reported speaking to children. These findings reveal a possible effect of children's overall level of language development and demonstrate the difficulty of adhering to a strict ‘one person, one language’ policy. The fact that there was longitudinal continuity in the language most mothers mainly spoke with children provided children with cumulative language input learning opportunities.
Recent findings suggest some properties of input in dual-language environments that influence its value for bilingual development, but the extant data base is small and sometimes inconclusive. The present study sought additional evidence regarding three quality indicators: the percent of input provided by native speakers, the number of different speakers providing input, and the frequency of language mixing. Participants were 90 thirty-month-olds exposed to Spanish and English. Using the Language Diary method to assess input and using multiple measures of children's bilingual skills, results replicated previous findings that the percent of input provided by native speakers is a positive quality indicator and found suggestive evidence that the number of speakers is also a positive quality indicator. There was little evidence that the frequency of language mixing is a negative indicator. These findings advance understanding of sources of variability in bilingual outcomes and have implications for programs to support bilingual development.
Translation equivalents (TEs) characterize the lexicon of bilinguals from the early stages of acquisition, as reported in studies involving English and other languages in which most cross-language synonyms are dissimilar in phonological form. This research explores the emergence of TEs in Spanish-Catalan bilinguals who are acquiring two languages with many cognate words and thus languages with many cross-language synonyms with identical or similar phonological forms. Expressive vocabulary was obtained in two 18-month-old groups (monolingual and bilingual, N =24 each) through parental report using a bilingual questionnaire. Four different vocabulary size measures were computed in bilinguals, correcting for different types of phonological overlap in words across their two languages. Bilinguals were found comparable to monolinguals in every measure except for Total Vocabulary Size (Spanish þ Catalan words) in which they outscored monolinguals due to the high number of form-identical cross-language elements in their expressive vocabularies. Form-similar and dissimilar TEs accounted for less than 2% of the words produced and were only present in infants with larger vocabularies. Results support the hypothesis that phonological form proximity between words across bilinguals’ two languages facilitates early lexical acquisition.
Acquiring a heritage language (HL), a minority language spoken primarily at home, is often a major step toward achieving bilingualism. Two studies examined factors that promote HL proficiency. Chinese-English and Spanish-English undergraduates and Hebrew-English children named pictures in both their languages, and they or their parents completed language history questionnaires. HL picture-naming ability correlated positively with the number of different HL speakers participants spoke to as children, independently of each language's frequency of use, and without negatively affecting English picture-naming ability. HL performance increased also when primary caregivers had lower English proficiency, with later English age of acquisition, and (in children) with increased age. These results suggest a prescription for increasing bilingual proficiency is regular interaction with multiple HL speakers. Responsible cognitive mechanisms could include greater variety of words used by different speakers, representational robustness from exposure to variations in form, or multiple retrieval cues, perhaps analogous to contextual diversity effects.
This study compares lexical access and expressive and receptive vocabulary development in monolingual and bilingual toddlers. More specifically, the link between vocabulary size, production of translation equivalents, and lexical access in bilingual infants was examined as well as the relationship between the Communicative Development Inventories and the Computerized Comprehension Task. Twenty-five bilingual and 18 monolingual infants aged 24 months participated in this study. The results revealed significant differences between monolingual and bilinguals' expressive vocabulary size in L1 but similar total vocabularies. Performance on the Computerized Comprehension Task revealed no differences between the two groups on measures of both reaction time and accuracy, and a strong convergent validity of the Computerized Comprehension Task with the Communicative Development Inventories was observed for both groups. Bilinguals with a higher proportion of translation equivalents in their expressive vocabulary showed faster access to words in the Computerized Comprehension Task.
This chapter summarizes several studies of the relation of language input to language development in Spanish-English bilingual children in the U.S., studied from the age of 22 to 30 months. Analyses compare these children to monolingual children from SES-equivalent homes and also examine sources of variability between different groups of bilingual children. The findings suggest that differences in the quantity of input explain differences between bilinguals and monolinguals in the rate of English growth and that differences in the relative quantity and quality of input explain individual differences among bilingual children in their rates of English and Spanish growth. Some of the differences in bilingual children’s language environments can be traced to effects of family composition variables, specifically the presence of school-aged older siblings in the home and whether one or both parents are native Spanish speakers.
The large and rapidly expanding body of literature on bilingual acquisition is mostly comprised of either single-case or cross-sectional studies. While these studies have made major contributions to our understanding of bilingual children's language development, they do not allow researchers to compare and contrast results with regard to individual differences over time. This paper aims to investigate the issue of individual differences with a longitudinal group study of 13 French–English bilingual children. The main focus is lexical development. We will examine how extralinguistic factors such as gender, parental input and birth order impact on the lexical development of the children. Using quantitative (parental checklists, questionnaires) and qualitative measures (interactions with parents), we demonstrate that language exposure and parental input are closely linked to vocabulary size, amount of language mixing and cross-linguistic synonyms. The findings call for more longitudinal group studies of bilingual acquisition in order to obtain comparable results on larger populations.
The time course and trajectory of development of phonetic perception in Spanish–Catalan bilingual and monolingual infants is different (Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 2003a, 2003b, 2005; Sebastián-Gallés & Bosch, 2009). Bosch and Sebastián-Gallés argue that, at least initially, bilingual infants track statistical regularities across the two languages, leading to their temporary inability to discriminate acoustically similar phonetic categories. In this paper, we test bilingual Spanish–English 4- and 8-month-olds’ discrimination of vowels. Results indicate that, when the two languages being learned are rhythmically dissimilar, bilingual infants are able to discriminate acoustically similar vowel contrasts that are phonemic in one, but not the other language, at an earlier age. These results substantiate a mechanism of language tagging or sorting; such a mechanism is likely to help bilingual infants calculate statistics separately for the two languages.
The relationship between amount of bilingual exposure and performance in receptive and expressive vocabulary in French and English was examined in 5-year-old Montreal children acquiring French and English simultaneously as well as in monolingual children. The children were equated on age, socio-economic status, nonverbal cognition, and on minority/majority language status (both languages have equal status), but differed in the amount of exposure they had received to each language spanning the continuum of bilingual exposure levels. A strong relationship was found between amount of exposure to a language and performance in that language. This relationship was different for receptive and expressive vocabulary. Children having been exposed to both languages equally scored comparably to monolingual children in receptive vocabulary, but greater exposure was required to match monolingual standards in expressive vocabulary. Contrary to many previous studies, the bilingual children were not found to exhibit a significant gap relative to monolingual children in receptive vocabulary. This was attributed to the favorable language-learning environment for French and English in Montreal and might also be related to the fact the two languages are fairly closely related. Children with early and late onset (before 6 months and after 20 months) of bilingual exposure who were equated on overall amount of exposure to each language did not differ significantly on any vocabulary measure.
The focus of this paper is on unusual developmental structures during the simultaneous acquisition of German and English in early childhood, which were evident parallel to a majority of target structures. The aim is to explain the cognitive motivation for unusual acquisition structures as well as the eventual retraction from them. I will show that they support the contentions of the Competition Model that language acquisition proceeds through orientation to surface structures and that cue competition across languages changes the weighting of cues within the language. The retreat from non-target structures was made possible through the children's attention to contrasts between the languages and the need to resolve structural incompatibilities within the language.
In this paper we want to compare the results from monolingual children with object omissions in bilingual children who have acquired two languages simultaneously. Our longitudinal studies of bilingual Dutch–French, German–French, and German–Italian children show that the bilingual children behave like monolingual children regarding the type of object omissions in the Romance languages. They differ from monolingual children with respect to the extent to which object drop is used. At the same time, the children differentiate the two systems they are using. We want to claim that the difference between monolingual and bilingual children concerning object omissions in the Romance languages is due to crosslinguistic influence in bilingual children: the Germanic language influences the Romance language. Crosslinguistic influence occurs once a syntactic construction in language A allows for more than one grammatical analysis from the perspective of child grammar and language B contains positive evidence for one of these possible analyses. The bilingual child is not able to map the universal strategies onto language-specific rules as quickly as the monolinguals, since s/he is confronted with a much wider range of language-specific syntactic possibilities. One of the possibilities seems to be compatible with a universal strategy. We would like to argue for the existence of crosslinguistic influence, induced by the mapping of universal principles onto language-specific principles – in particular, pragmatic onto syntactic principles. This influence will be defined as mapping
induced
influence. We will account for the object omissions by postulating an empty discourse-connected PRO in pre-S position (Müller, Crysmann, and Kaiser, 1996; Hulk, 1997). Like monolingual children, bilingual children use this possibility until they show evidence of the C-system (the full clause) in its target form.
a b s t r a c t Research on the development of speech processing in bilingual children has typically implemented a cross-sectional design and relied on behavioral measures. The present study is the first to explore brain measures within a longitudinal study of this population. We report results from the first phase of data analysis in a longitudinal study exploring Spanish-English bilingual children and the relationships among (a) early brain measures of phonetic discrimination in both languages, (b) degree of exposure to each language in the home, and (c) children's later bilingual word production abilities. Speech discrimination was assessed with event-related brain potentials (ERPs). A bilingual questionnaire was used to quantify the amount of language exposure from all adult speakers in the household, and subsequent word production was evaluated in both languages. Our results suggest that bilingual infants' brain responses to speech differ from the pattern shown by monolingual infants. Bilingual infants did not show neural discrimination of either the Spanish or English contrast at 6–9 months. By 10–12 months of age, neural discrimination was observed for both contrasts. Bilingual infants showed continuous improvement in neural discrimination of the phonetic units from both languages with increasing age. Group differences in bilingual infants' speech discrimination abilities are related to the amount of exposure to each of their native languages in the home. Finally, we show that infants' later word production measures are significantly related to both their early neural discrimination skills and the amount exposure to the two languages early in development.
This prospective longitudinal study examined the contribution of dimensions of maternal responsiveness (descriptions, play, imitations) to the timing of five milestones in children's (N= 40) early expressive language: first imitations, first words, 50 words in expressive language, combinatorial speech, and the use of language to talk about the past. Events-History Analysis, a statistical technique that estimates the extent to which predictors influence the timing of events, was used. At 9 and 13 months, maternal responsiveness and children's activities (e.g., vocalizations, play) were coded from videotaped interactions of mother – child free play; information about children's language acquisition was obtained through biweekly interviews with mothers from 9 through 21 months. Maternal responsiveness at both ages predicted the timing of children's achieving language milestones over and above children's observed behaviors. Responsiveness at 13 months was a stronger predictor of the timing of language milestones than was responsiveness at 9 months, and certain dimensions of responsiveness were more predictive than others. The multidimensional nature of maternal responsiveness and specificity in mother – child language relations are discussed.
In societies like the United States with diverse populations, children from linguistic minority families must learn the language of the society in order to take full advantage of the educational opportunities offered by the society. The timing and the conditions under which they come into contact with English, however, can profoundly affect the retention and continued use of their primary languages as well as the development of their second language. This article discusses evidence and findings from a nationwide study of language shift among language-minority children in the U.S. The findings suggest that the loss of a primary language, particularly when it is the only language spoken by parents, can be very costly to the children, their families, and to society as a whole. Immigrant and American Indian families were surveyed to determine the extent to which family language patterns were affected by their children's early learning of English in preschool programs. Families whose children had attended preschool programs conducted exclusively in Spanish served as a base of comparison for the families whose children attended English-only or bilingual preschools.