Inter-individual variation among young children growing up in a bidialectal community

Cognitive Advantages of Bilingual Children in Different Sociolinguistic Contexts

“…Frequent mixing in the Limburgish context is, moreover, supported by the study of Francot et al (in press) who observed that in a Limburgish word naming task, children used many mixed forms that had characteristics of both Limburgish and Dutch. If these cross-regional differences in language use are representative of the children in our sample, the Limburgish parents may have rated their children’s Limburgish relatively low because of frequent mixing with Dutch or because their children’s language use is not in accordance with the parents’ normative idea of how a dialect should be spoken.…”

“…Interestingly, recent research comparing tweets in Fryslân and Limburg suggests that Limburgish is more often used in tweets than Frisian, but also that Limburgish is more frequently mixed with Dutch ( Trieschnigg et al, 2015 ), which is consistent with the findings by Giesbers (1989) showing frequent mixing between Limburgish and Dutch. Frequent mixing in the Limburgish context is, moreover, supported by the study of Francot et al (in press ) who observed that in a Limburgish word naming task, children used many mixed forms that had characteristics of both Limburgish and Dutch. If these cross-regional differences in language use are representative of the children in our sample, the Limburgish parents may have rated their children’s Limburgish relatively low because of frequent mixing with Dutch or because their children’s language use is not in accordance with the parents’ normative idea of how a dialect should be spoken.…”

Cross-language distance influences receptive vocabulary outcomes of bilingual children

“…The relatively good performance on Dutch receptive vocabulary in these two groups of regional language users is in line with the pattern found in the larger sample of 5- to 9-year-old Limburgish–Dutch children from which the current sample was drawn. In that study, we found that the Limburgish–Dutch sample scored significantly above the normative mean of 100 on the Dutch PPVT (Francot et al, 2017). Group comparisons confirmed this pattern: the Distant group had lower Dutch receptive vocabulary scores than the (very similarly performing) Dutch monolinguals and Close bilinguals.…”

“…We also expected that more specific comparisons between monolinguals and bilingual subgroups would nuance this overall impression. Given the small linguistic distance between Dutch and Frisian and Dutch and Limburgish, we expected that the Frisian and Limburgish children would score similarly on the PPVT as their monolingual Dutch age peers (Francot et al, 2017), unlike bilingual children who are exposed to a more distant language, like the Polish, Moroccan or Turkish children in the Netherlands. These children are expected to be less well able to recognize words in Dutch because the migrant languages they are exposed to at home facilitate Dutch word recognition much less than the Dutch regional languages do.…”

Cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism

“…As Kupisch and Klaschik (this volume) point out, the notion of cross-linguistic influence in the bilingual context presupposes the existence of separate systems. However, many bidialectal communities reveal sociolinguistic repertoires that are intermediate between the standard and the dialect, casting doubt on the two-separate-systems hypothesis (Auer, 2015;Cornips, 2017 (in press); Cornips, 2014;Francot et al, 2017).…”