Language Strength in Bilingual Children: The Child HALA Test

Abstract

This study investigates potential shifts in relative language dominance in early sequential bilinguals across the primary school years. The subjects are thirty-eight Polish-English speaking children. We introduce a new test, the Child HALA, which measures shifts in relative language strength by comparing lexical accuracy and access between two languages. This test has been designed specifically for use with children, and is based on the HALA psycholinguistic tool (O'Grady, Schaffer, Perla, Lee, & Wieting, 2009). The aim is to examine its suitability, reliability and applicability in research on language acquisition and maintenance in young bilinguals. In particular, we attempt to evaluate whether the test will show a pattern of shifts in language dominance comparable to the outcomes of previous research (Kohnert, Bates & Hernandez, 1999; Kohnert & Bates, 2002, among others). We find that the Child HALA test discovers reliable results across age groups and languages when compared with other studies that investigated lexical accuracy and access, and therefore may be considered as a reliable method in assessing language strength and maintenance in children. The results show that the children’s relative language dominance shifts from the initially stronger Polish to the more dominant English between the age of eight and eleven.