Patterns of language switching and bilingual children’s word learning: An experiment across two communities.

Abstract

Language switching is common in bilingual environments, including those of many bilingual children. Some bilingual children hear rapid switching that involves immediate translation of words (an "immediate-translation" pattern), while others hear their languages most often in long blocks of a single language (a "one-language-at-a-time" pattern). Our two-site experimental study compared two groups of developing bilinguals from different communities, and investigated whether differences in the timing of language switching impose different demands on bilingual children's learning of novel nouns in their two languages: do children learn differently if they hear a translation immediately versus if they hear translations more separated in time? Using an at-home online tablet word learning task, data were collected asynchronously from 3-to 5-year-old bilinguals from French-English bilingual families in Montreal, Canada (N = 31) and Spanish-English bilingual families in New Jersey, USA (N = 22). Results showed that bilingual children in both communities readily learned new words, and their performance was similar across the immediate-translation and one-language-at-a-time conditions. Our findings highlight that different types of bilingual interactions can provide equal learning opportunities for bilingual children's vocabulary development.What is the significance of this article for the general public? This study explored whether different patterns of language switching affect bilingual children's word learning-a question that is often asked by caregivers raising bilingual children. Our results show that different patterns of bilingual interaction provide equal learning opportunities for bilingual children's vocabulary development.

Translational approaches to bilingualism and multilingualism research.

“…In bilingual households, language switching is a typical occurrence. Tsui et al (2023) examined whether the type of language switching (hearing a translation immediately or hearing a translation separated in time) influences bilingual children’s novel word learning. Do bilingual children acquire new words in both languages more effectively if they immediately hear a translation of the word, or is it better to use one language at a time?…”