Abstract
The variable language skills of children from immigrant families create challenges for families, teachers, and policy makers. A first step toward meeting those challenges is to understand the factors that influence language development in children who hear a language other than the country's majority language at home. We present findings from analyses of longitudinal data on children in immigrant families in the United States that contribute to that understanding. Our findings support four broad conclusions: (1) Children who are exposed to two languages simultaneously will lag behind monolingual children in their rates of single language growth. This is the normal result of distributed language exposure. (2) Language exposure provided by native speakers is more supportive of language growth than exposure provided by nonnative speakers. Therefore, immigrant parents should be encouraged to interact with their children in the language that allows the richest, most meaningful conversations, not necessarily in the majority language. (3) Preschool attendance does not always provide support for majority language skill. Attention needs to be paid to the quality of language support provided in preschool classrooms if they are to benefit language growth. (4) Acquiring the heritage language does not interfere with acquiring the majority language. Rather, it is heritage language acquisition that is vulnerable.
Highlights
Children exposed to two languages must, on average, hear less of each language than children exposed to only one language
(2) Language exposure provided by native speakers is more supportive of language growth than exposure provided by nonnative speakers
Some early studies of small samples of bilingually developing children claimed that bilingual children develop in each of their languages at the same pace as monolingual children develop in their single language (Pearson, Fernández, & Oller, 1993; Petitto et al, 2001), subsequent research has not supported that claim (Hoff, 2015, 2018)
Summary
Children exposed to two languages must, on average, hear less of each language than children exposed to only one language. A very basic question about bilingual development concerns the effects of such divided language exposure. Nativist theories of language acquisition, which explain language acquisition more as the result of an inborn “instinct” (Pinker, 2003) and less as result of language experience, predict minimal effects of divided exposure. Usage-based theories, which explain language acquisition as a result of general learning process operating on the information available in the speech children hear (Tomasello, 2015), predict that the amount of language exposure should have clear, observable effects on the rate of language development. One of the most robust findings in the study of early bilingual development is a relation between the quantity of children’s exposure to each language and their levels of knowledge of each language. Quantity of language exposure accounted for 50 percent of the variance in the children’s Spanish expressive vocabulary scores and 28 percent of the variance in the children’s English expressive vocabulary scores (Marchman, Martínez, Hurtado, Grüter, & Fernald, 2017)
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