Profiles of bilingualism in early childhood: A person-centred Latent Profile Transition Approach

Abstract

Bilingualism as it occurs in current societies is a complex, multidimensional and dynamic phenomenon, calling for new approaches to capture this concept. This study shows the feasibility of a person-centred approach by combining measures of the use of and proficiency in the first and second language from 110 young Turkish–Dutch children at two measurement waves, using two existing datasets. Latent Profile Analysis revealed four profiles, equivalent at age four and six: 1) Dominant L1 use, relatively low L1 and L2 proficiency, 2) Dual L1 and L2 use, around average L1 and L2 proficiency, 3) Dominant L1 use, relatively high L1 and L2 proficiency and 4) Dominant L2 use, relatively high L2 proficiency. Latent Transition Analysis indicated that children changed in profiles over time. Regression analyses showed that profiles were differently related to the family's socioeconomic status and children's nonverbal intelligence at age four. No relations were found at age six.

Regular and Irregular Inflection in Different Groups of Bilingual Children and the Role of Verbal Short-Term and Verbal Working Memory

“…Although all three languages have rich inflectional systems, we expected that the groups of children with Arabic, Tarifit or Turkish as the minority language would perform lower than the Frisian group on regular and irregular inflection in Dutch, because of much less phonological and morphological overlap with Dutch. Arabic, Tarifit, and Turkish are quite similar to each other in terms of distance to Dutch (Blom et al 2020). Yet, for the purpose of the current study, we did not collapse the data from the bilingual Arabic-Dutch, Tarifit-Dutch and Turkish-Dutch children, because previous research suggests notable differences in bilingual exposure, use and proficiency between these groups and patterns found for one group do not necessarily generalize to other groups (Scheele et al 2010;Blom 2019).…”

“…Comparing performances across groups that have a different minority language can provide insight into the role of cross-language distance and transfer (Blom et al 2020;Floccia et al 2018). Several studies have investigated accuracy at using English tense marking inflection in English language learners in Canada dividing the sample of participating children into children learning a tense-marking inflecting minority language and children learning a non-tense marking isolating minority language (Paradis 2011;Blom et al 2012).…”

“…Beyond that, the ways in which children's environments provide exposure to two (or more) languages vary enormously." This statement highlights the variation that exists within the bilingual population, which pertains to exposure and use (Francot et al 2020). Others argue that a binary categorical distinction between monolinguals and bilinguals falls short in describing the actual variation that exists in both groups (Surrain and Luk 2017;Bialystok et al 2012;Dixon et al 2012;Kroll and Bialystok 2013).…”

Language production and cognitive abilities in child heritage speakers

“…This finding stresses the heterogeneity in child bilinguals and shows a 'receptive-expressive gap' that has been described in child heritage speakers (Ribot & Hoff, 2014). It further stresses that language use and language proficiency are two different aspects of bilingualism that result in different bilingual profiles (Francot et al, 2021). Regarding language production, the difference in heritage language input between the two groups only affected language production (in Dutch) at the level of lexical access, but did not affect the accuracy and fluency of produced speech.…”

Immigrant parents’ acculturation strategies and involvement in children’s education

“…Table 3.3 shows the correlations for the study variables, for both target groups. There was a strong negative correlation between informal education offered in L1 versus L2, reflecting that the time for exposure to one language competes with the time for exposure to the other language within the family context (Francot et al, 2020;Leseman et al, 2019;Place & Hoff, 2011). Intercultural socialization was positively related to informal education in L1 and negatively related to informal education in L2, but only for the Maghreb parents.…”