Early Language Environments Predict Aspects of Explicit Language Awareness Development

Abstract

Although language awareness is typically defined as the explicit understanding of language's functions and conventions, much evidence on the influence of diverse language environments on language awareness has shown implicit understandings of language. In contrast, this study examined whether exposure to linguistic diversity predicted monolingual children's explicit language awareness. We examined four aspects of children's explicit language awareness: ability to label languages, understanding of the communicative consequences of speaking different languages, understanding of labeling conventions, and awareness of their language environment. Participants were monolingual 3-to 5-year-olds (N = 81) who were from (a) a relatively linguistically homogenous community, (b) a relatively linguistically diverse community, or (c) a bilingual household in a relatively linguistically diverse community. Results suggest that community linguistic diversity and home bilingual exposure predict children's explicit language labeling and understanding of labeling conventions but not other aspects of language for their help with participant recruitment and data collection. We also appreciate the helpful feedback and comments provided Language Environment and Language Awareness awareness. These findings provide insight into the role of early language environments in explicit language awareness development.

Do Kindergarteners Develop Awareness of the Statistical Regularities They Acquire?

“…The linguistic background of the children might play a role in explaining the individual differences in our study. Several authors have suggested, for example, that bilingualism might influence the development of metalinguistic awareness (Atagi & Sandhofer, 2020; Barac & Bialystok, 2012; Bialystok, 1986), which might also be the case in our sample. For this study, we opted not to collect any data that did not pertain to our research questions.…”

“…Because of these limitations and because we cannot expect children to verbalize rules or partake in confidence judgment tasks, given that they probably do not possess P‐awareness, it seems unreasonable to employ these methods to test awareness in children. Other lines of research into awareness in young children, such as awareness of language itself at a macro‐level (e.g., Atagi & Sandhofer, 2020) or metalinguistic awareness about written language (Ke, Miller, Zhang, & Koda, 2020) are also limited in that they do not give us methods for tapping into awareness of grammar during exposure to a new spoken language. Several tasks, such as grammaticality judgment tasks and wug tests, have been argued to tap into metalinguistic awareness and so might overcome these difficulties (Barac & Bialystok, 2012; Bialystok, 1986).…”

Measuring the Impact of Genetic and Environmental Risk and Protective Factors on Speech, Language, and Communication Development-Evidence from Australia

“…Using robust panel fixed-effects models, the results demonstrate that there are clear and consistent effects of protective factors associated with the infant’s family, the in utero environment, and early infant health. It is well documented in the literature that the family environment is an important predictor of children’s language and literacy [ 37 ], particularly family socio-economic status (SES) [ 40 , 41 ] and the home literacy environment (HLE) [ 15 , 42 ]. Interestingly, the results from our study indicated that positive parenting had a greater role to play in early language development than explicit measures of SES or educational poverty.…”

Investigating young Finnish CLIL pupils’ perceptions of foreign language use through visual narratives

“…Particularly for the young, the role of English is further strengthened, as social media and the Internet play a significant role in their freetime. Some studies have looked at teachers' perceptions of language awareness in early language learning (Hansell & Bergroth, 2020), but as to children themselves, there is very little research (Atagi & Sandhofer, 2020) and even less in institutional language learning settings. Other evidence from children growing up in diverse language environments such as a multilingual community or a multilingual home suggests that these experiences may affect the development of language awareness (Atagi & Sandhofer, 2020).…”