Research shows correlations between proficiency and language attitudes. Other studies associate performance in young bilinguals more strongly with adult language input and practice at home than with individual attitudes in youth. No studies, however, have examined how attitudes and family practice are implicated in the linguistic development of bilingual children. This study examines (1) the interplay between attitudinal and objective factors in setting the input conditions relevant for child bilingual acquisition; (2) how parental attitudes and community context shape home language practices and input conditions; and (3) how input conditions determine bilingual proficiency and degree of morphosyntactic transfer in young bilinguals. Twenty three bilingual children participated in the study. Children completed an elicited narrative and a word order task to assess the extent of transfer. They were asked to repeat sentences with clitics in reconstruction environments. If object pronoun linearization was vulnerable to transfer, children with stronger English dominance were expected to favor postverbal positioning. Results show strong correlation between family’s attitudes to Spanish and bilingualism, but only moderate association between these and language practice. The most important difference in terms of dominance between the children related to onset of bilingualism. Results from the repetition task show a tendency by bilinguals to reposition preverbal pronouns as postverbal, a pattern not attested among monolinguals, and a lesser degree of the preverbal pattern. The simultaneous bilinguals favor the predicted transfer pattern more strongly, and also show high rates of pronoun omissions. These results suggest that input conditions are the primary factor in language maintenance in young bilinguals.
Castilla-Earls, Anny, Juliana Ronderos & Lisa Fitton
2022. Can Bilingual Children Self-Report Their Bilingual Experience and Proficiency? The Houston Questionnaire. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 65:10 ► pp. 3835 ff.
CHEUNG, SHIRLEY, PUI FONG KAN, ELLIE WINICOUR & JERRY YANG
2019. Effects of home language input on the vocabulary knowledge of sequential bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 22:5 ► pp. 986 ff.
2022. Comparing Family Language Policy in Cyprus, Estonia and Sweden: Efforts and Choices Among Russian-Speaking Families. In Transmitting Minority Languages [Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities, ], ► pp. 279 ff.
Kennedy, Kimberley D. & Harriett D. Romo
2013. “All Colors and Hues”: An Autoethnography of a Multiethnic Family's Strategies for Bilingualism and Multiculturalism. Family Relations 62:1 ► pp. 109 ff.
2019. Children’s language exposure and parental language attitudes in Russian-as-a-heritage-language acquisition by bilingual and multilingual children in Canada. International Journal of Bilingualism 23:2 ► pp. 457 ff.
Mejía, Glenda
2016. Language usage and culture maintenance: a study of Spanish-speaking immigrant mothers in Australia. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 37:1 ► pp. 23 ff.
2021. Heritage Languages in Canada. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 178 ff.
Nakamura, Janice
2016. Hidden Bilingualism: Ideological Influences on the Language Practices of Multilingual Migrant Mothers in Japan. International Multilingual Research Journal 10:4 ► pp. 308 ff.
PARADIS, Johanne
2023. Sources of individual differences in the dual language development of heritage bilinguals. Journal of Child Language► pp. 1 ff.
PÉREZ-LEROUX, ANA T.
2017. The untouchables. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 20:1 ► pp. 31 ff.
PÉREZ-LEROUX, ANA TERESA, ALEJANDRO CUZA & DANIELLE THOMAS
2011. Clitic placement in Spanish–English bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 14:2 ► pp. 221 ff.
Sopata, Aldona & Aleksandra Putowska
2021. Polnisch als Herkunftssprache in Deutschland – Einfluss der Familiensprachenpolitik auf die Sprachentwicklung der Kinder. In Angewandte Linguistik – Neue Herausforderungen und Konzepte, ► pp. 203 ff.
Yakushkina, Maria & Daniel J. Olson
2017. Language use and identity in the Cuban community in Russia. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 38:1 ► pp. 50 ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. Heritage Languages around the World. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 11 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 may 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.