Social Competence and Language Skills in Mandarin–English Bilingual Preschoolers: The Moderation Effect of Emotion Regulation

Language Proficiency, Parenting Styles, and Socioemotional Adjustment of Young Dual Language Learners

“…However, the findings on the links between HL proficiency and adjustment are inconsistent. While some studies found HL proficiency to be positively associated with socioemotional adjustment in Spanish-EL DLLs (e.g., Collins et al, 2011, Dawson & Williams, 2008), another study found HL proficiency to be associated with higher internalizing behaviors in Mandarin-EL DLLs (e.g., Ren et al, 2016). Ren et al (2016) argued that this relation may be due to the children’s social context – children who speak more Mandarin may be rejected by their peers or may experience more authoritarian parenting practices.…”

“…While some studies found HL proficiency to be positively associated with socioemotional adjustment in Spanish-EL DLLs (e.g., Collins et al, 2011, Dawson & Williams, 2008), another study found HL proficiency to be associated with higher internalizing behaviors in Mandarin-EL DLLs (e.g., Ren et al, 2016). Ren et al (2016) argued that this relation may be due to the children’s social context – children who speak more Mandarin may be rejected by their peers or may experience more authoritarian parenting practices. In addition to the inconsistency in findings, previous studies have several methodological limitations, such as the reliance on subjective (e.g., parent report) rather than objective language measures, failure to consider both the main and interactive effects of HL and EL proficiency on socioemotional outcomes, or the lack of examining parenting as a mechanism (Halle et al, 2014).…”

“…The current literature is limited in its examination of: 1) how DLLs’ development in both EL and HL are associated with their socioemotional adjustment during early childhood, a critical period for language and socioemotional development (see Halle et al, 2014 for a review), and 2) how parenting may mediate the relationship between children’s EL and HL ability and their adjustment outcomes. Previous studies have found some evidence that higher EL proficiency is associated with better socioemotional adjustment in Latino and Asian DLLs during preschool to early elementary school period (e.g., Chen, Hua, et al, 2014; Collins, Toppelberg, Suárez-Orozco, O’Connor, & Nieto-Castañon, 2011; Dawson & Williams, 2008; Ren, Wyver, Xu, & Demuth, 2016). However, the findings on the links between HL proficiency and adjustment are inconsistent.…”

“…Based on the research on parent-child language/cultural orientation gap and child maladjustment (Chen et al, 2014), we hypothesized that: 2c) the positive relation of children’s HL proficiency to adjustment would be stronger if parents had higher (than lower) heritage orientation. We examined family SES factors and parent’s length of time living in the U.S. and children’s age, gender, and generation status as covariates because they have been tied to language proficiency, cultural orientations, parenting, and socioemotional outcomes in previous studies (Chen et al, 2014; Halle et al, 2014; Ren et al, 2016). Due to sample size constraint, we did not test if cultural group (MA vs. CA) moderates the relations among constructs, although we controlled for cultural group in testing the hypothesized models.…”

Home Environment, Bilingual Preschooler’s Receptive Mother Tongue Language Outcomes, and Social-Emotional and Behavioral Skills: One Stone for Two Birds?

“…On the other hand, gender seems to have a clearer link to social-emotional outcomes. It has been shown to predict level of externalizing or internalizing behaviors using varied socio-emotional measures, where boys were observed to exhibit higher levels of externalizing behaviors than girls (Ebert et al, 2013; Ren et al, 2016). Specifically, boys were reported to score higher in the Difficulties subscale of the strengths and difficulties questionnaire (SDQ) as opposed to girls, while girls scored higher in the Prosocial subscale in the Danish population (Niclasen et al, 2012), as well as in the Singapore context (Bull et al, 2016; Sun et al, 2018c).…”