This article reports on a study that addresses the following question: why do some children exposed to two languages from early on fail to speak those two languages? Questionnaire data were collected in 1,899 families in which at least one of the parents spoke a language other than the majority language. Each questionnaire asked about the home language use of a family consisting of at least one parent and one child between the ages of 6 and 10 years old. The results show that the children in these families all spoke the majority language, but that minority language use was not universal. Differences in parental language input patterns used at home correlated with differences in child minority language use. Home input patterns where both parents used the minority language and where at most one parent spoke the majority language had a high chance of success. The “one parent–one language” strategy did not provide a necessary nor sufficient input condition. Implications for bilingual families are discussed.
It is often assumed that young bilinguals are lexically delayed in comparison to monolinguals. A comprehensive comparison of comprehension and production vocabulary in 31 firstborn bilingual and 30 matched monolingual children fails to find empirical foundation for this assumption. Several raters completed Dutch and French adaptations of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories for children aged 13 and 20 months. At 13 months, bilinguals understood more words than monolinguals; at 20 months, monolinguals knew more Dutch words than bilinguals (combining comprehension and production). There were no group differences for word production or for Dutch word comprehension. Both groups understood and produced the same number of lexicalized meanings; ratios of word comprehension to word production did not differ; inter-individual variation was similar. This study underscores the importance of conducting bilingual-monolingual comparisons with matched groups and suggests that if individual bilingual children appear to be slow in early vocabulary development, reasons other than their bilingualism should be investigated.
A basic question that arises with respect to early bilingual comprehension is whether, as in production, bilingual infants understand words from two languages that have the same meaning (translation equivalents). This study addresses this question using CDI-data from 31 children growing up bilingual in French and Dutch. Raters report that 13-month-old bilingual infants all understand translation equivalents; however, the extent to which children understand translation equivalents is marked by considerable inter-individual variability. This understanding is related to how many meanings children understand: the more advanced infants' comprehension skills are, the more meanings they know in two languages rather than just one.
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