How Does L1 and L2 Exposure Impact L1 Performance in Bilingual Children? Evidence from Polish-English Migrants to the United Kingdom

Abstract

Most studies on bilingual language development focus on children’s second language (L2). Here, we investigated first language (L1) development of Polish-English early migrant bilinguals in four domains: vocabulary, grammar, phonological processing, and discourse. We first compared Polish language skills between bilinguals and their Polish non-migrant monolingual peers, and then investigated the influence of the cumulative exposure to L1 and L2 on bilinguals’ performance. We then examined whether high exposure to L1 could possibly minimize the gap between monolinguals and bilinguals. We analyzed data from 233 typically developing children (88 bilingual and 145 monolingual) aged 4;0 to 7;5 (years;months) on six language measures in Polish: receptive vocabulary, productive vocabulary, receptive grammar, productive grammar (sentence repetition), phonological processing (non-word repetition), and discourse abilities (narration). Information about language exposure was obtained via parental questionnaires. For each language task, we analyzed the data from the subsample of bilinguals who had completed all the tasks in question and from monolinguals matched one-on-one to the bilingual group on age, SES (measured by years of mother’s education), gender, non-verbal IQ, and short-term memory. The bilingual children scored lower than monolinguals in all language domains, except discourse. The group differences were more pronounced on the productive tasks (vocabulary, grammar, and phonological processing) and moderate on the receptive tasks (vocabulary and grammar). L1 exposure correlated positively with the vocabulary size and phonological processing. Grammar scores were not related to the levels of L1 exposure, but were predicted by general cognitive abilities. L2 exposure negatively influenced productive grammar in L1, suggesting possible L2 transfer effects on L1 grammatical performance. Children’s narrative skills benefitted from exposure to two languages: both L1 and L2 exposure influenced story structure scores in L1. Importantly, we did not find any evidence (in any of the tasks in which the gap was present) that the performance gap between monolinguals and bilinguals could be fully closed with high amounts of L1 input.

Retelling a model story improves the narratives of Polish-English bilingual children

“…Still, studies of the language development of Polish-speaking bilingual children are scarce (e.g. Haman et al 2017;Marecka et al 2015;Miękisz et al 2016;Tamburelli et al 2015), and none of them have focused specifically on children's narrative production and comprehension. Our large-scale study aimed at examining the narrative abilities of Polish-English bilingual pre-and early-school children raised in the UK.…”

“…Each session lasted approximately 45-90 min, including breaks, depending on the child's pace. The order of the tasks in the testing sessions was counterbalanced (for details see Haman et al 2017).…”

“…The research on various aspects of language development of Polish-speaking bilingual children is relatively new (e.g. Tamburelli et al 2015;Marecka et al 2015;Miękisz et al 2016;Mieszkowska et al 2017;Haman et al 2017), and none of the studies so far have focused specifically on the retelling effects in child narrative production.…”

Learning Difficulties in First and Second Language: Preliminary Results from a Cross-linguistic Skills Transfer

“…Furthermore, decoding skills rely heavily on phonological skills and there is sufficient evidence that phonological skills in L1 are highly correlated with phonological skills in L2 (Abu-Rabia & Siegel, 2002. Of course, we must also bare in mind that both phonological development and processing rely on the cumulative language exposure (Haman et al, 2017). Something else to be pointed out is that students whose L1 is Greek are based solely on matching phonemes to graphemes and therefore this is the strategy they use when they read their L2 (English).…”

Ratunku! or Just Tunku! Evidence for the Reliability and Concurrent Validity of the Language Use Inventory–Polish

“…Second, there is an urgent need to provide practitioners and clinicians outside Englishspeaking societies with reliable and valid techniques to diagnose language impairments/delays as early as possible (Uyanik & Kandir, 2014). Third, in modern multilanguage societies, there is a strong necessity to prepare tools valid for the growing populations of bilingual children, such as the Polish-English migrant population in the United Kingdom (Haman et al, 2017; see also Petersen, Chanthongthip, Ukrainetz, Spencer, & Steeve, 2017;Pua, Lee, & Rickard Liow, 2017). Therefore, in our study, we aimed to adapt to Polish a measure of pragmatic development, the Language Use Inventory (LUI;O'Neill, 2009;Pesco & O'Neill, 2012), and to describe the pragmatic development of Polish 2-to 4-year-olds.…”