Abstract
Abstract In this paper we examine whether – conditional on other child endowments and family inputs – bilingual children achieve different language, emotional, and pro-social developmental outcomes. Our data, which allow us to analyze children's development in a dynamic framework, are extracted from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). We model the development production functions for bilingual children using cumulative value-added specifications, which account for parental investments and children's own ability. Analysis based on child age confirms that bilingual children initially have worse language skills than their monolingual peers. The commencement of schooling appears to attenuate these differences, and by age seven, bilingual children have a developmental advantage. We find evidence of a positive relationship between bilingualism and some aspects of emotional development, and it is mainly boys who appear to benefit from their bilingual background.
Highlights
Schools, especially in major urban cities, are used by a large number of children for whom English is a second language
Our primary objective is to understand whether – relative to their monolingual peers – there is a gap in the language, emotional, and pro-social development of children exposed to a foreign language at home, and how this gap evolves over time
Motivated by our findings that bilingual differences in language assessments appear as early as the age of three and that the gap narrows over time, we investigate whether there are corresponding patterns of disparities in maternal behavior and home environment that can explain these early deficits in child development
Summary
Especially in major urban cities, are used by a large number of children for whom English is a second language. These children speak numerous home languages and often constitute the majority of children in a single classroom (Bialystok, 2006). There is a debate going on, which is largely centered around the economic merits of speaking a second language in the context of globalization – directly addressing the danger of a country that relies on the primacy of, say, English (see Nuffield Foundation (2002) for one example of the debate in relation to the UK). The wider question is, to what extent bilingualism matters in the early phase of a child’s development, or whether bilingual children perform better than English-only students (Bialystok et al, 2012; Hoff, 2013)
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