Probability of Heritage Language Use at a Supportive Early Childhood Setting in Australia

Abstract

Despite well-established research that documents the intellectual, linguistic, sociocultural and familiar benefits of early childhood bilingualism, Australia's provision of heritage language (HL) support in early childhood (EC) settings is fairly minimal, resulting in little to no access to the HL outside of the home. We report on language data from a long day care preschool that has an open bilingual policy, where two languages (HL and English) are used in naturalistic interactions between children and educators. While the quantity of language input and output is known to impact on language proficiency, there are no prior studies which focus on establishing the quantitative nature of naturalistic language production in a bilingual preschool. Our goal was to document the relative language input and output of HL and English and to examine whether there are differences across age groups in the EC setting, and during different activity types. We followed a quantitative approach in data analysis, with child and educator observations over a period of 8 weeks and an analysis of targeted videos amounting to close to an hour of recordings per child. We used Bayesian modeling to test the probability of HL use in the different age groups and per activity type. Overall, HL input was higher for toddlers than preschoolers and toddlers received more HL input than English, while preschoolers received comparable input in both languages. The higher probability of HL input in toddlers was particularly evident during story time and playing activities. Our results indicate a high level of HL use in this EC setting, suggesting success in HL maintenance and promotion of early bilingualism. Further research should explore the children's relative language output in relation to their input, individual differences, as well as extending the current methodology to other similar settings in Australia.

Investigating orthographic versus auditory cross-situational word learning with online and lab-based research

“…• Evidence ratios of 10-30 (or of 1/10-1/30) are "strong" evidence for the tested hypothesis • Evidence ratios above 30 (or of 1/30 and beyond) are "very strong" evidence for the tested hypothesis As explained in Milne and Herff (2020) and Escudero et al, (2020), an evidence ratio of 19 is roughly similar to an alpha of .05 in NHST. Hence, we report only those effects with an evidence ratio of 19 or above unless specified otherwise.…”

“…The analyses were conducted in the statistical program R (R Core Team, 2014) with the brms package (using Stan) (Bürkner, 2017(Bürkner, , 2018 R Core Team, 2014). Similar approaches have been used previously in Escudero et al, (2020) and Smit et al, (2019;2020;2020a). A comprehensive overview of the methods is described in Smit et al, (2019) and Escudero et al, (2020).…”

“…Similar approaches have been used previously in Escudero et al, (2020) and Smit et al, (2019;2020;2020a). A comprehensive overview of the methods is described in Smit et al, (2019) and Escudero et al, (2020).…”

“…In contrast with null-hypothesis significant testing (NHST), we here assess the evidence for a hypothesis by using evidence ratios (probability ratios or odds) which quantify the likelihood of the tested hypothesis against its alternative (Escudero et al, 2020;Smit et al, 2019;2020;2020a). Following Smit et al, (2019;2020;2020a,), and Escudero et al, (2020), we also use the guidelines that were proposed by Jeffreys (1998) as cited by Kruschke (2018):…”

Four-Year-Old's Online Versus Face-to-Face Word Learning via eBooks

“…Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, face-to-face testing to increase this sample size has not been possible. Although similar sample sizes have been reported in previous, similar studies (Giezen et al, 2016;Pino Escobar et al, 2018;Junttila and Ylinen, 2020), we acknowledge this as a potential limitation, which can be overcome with extra data collection when the current pandemic allows or by using a Bayesian approach when comparing inperson and online results [see for instance Escudero et al (2020) and Escudero et al (2021)].…”