Predicting two Mandarin-English bilingual children’s first 50 words: Effects of frequency and relative exposure in the input

Abstract

This study tested two hypotheses that relate children’s early words to the input: (1) the language of bilingual children’s first words is correlated with their exposure time to each language and (2) children are more likely to acquire words from the first and/or last position in utterances. We tested these hypotheses with spontaneous language use in the families of two Mandarin—English bilingual children, followed longitudinally every three months from 6 months to 18 months. The results showed that the exposure time was a good but not perfect predictor of the language of the children’s first 50 words. Also, both children learned more nouns in both languages than appeared in first or last position of their caregivers’ utterances. We discuss these results in terms of support for a noun bias in children’s minds and highlight the need for future research to take into account socio-cultural variables.