Trilingual families’ language strategies: potential predictors and effect on trilingual exposure

Abstract

Trilingual families' language strategies: potential predictors and effect on trilingual exposureFamily language strategies are approaches that parents adopt for language use with their multilingual children. In bilingual contexts, these strategies influence children's language exposure and development (Macleod et al., 2022). In the more complex context of trilingualism, how families settle on strategies and their relationship with exposure may differ. We examined these relationships in a preregistered online study of 31 families raising trilingual toddlers aged 18-36 months living in Montreal with English, French -the city's two community languagesand various heritage languages. Families' language strategy and language background, children's exposure, and parents' attitudes and concerns towards children's trilingualism were assessed via questionnaire. The most frequent strategies adopted involved mixed use of a community and heritage language with children. Strategies that excluded the community languages at home were associated with lower parent proficiency in the community languages and higher heritage language exposure. Mixed strategies led to more balanced exposure to the three languages. Attitudes towards trilingualism were favorable, concerns were weak, and neither showed a relationship with family language strategy choice.These findings shed new light on unique features of trilingual language environments and open future directions for research on how they relate to the development of three languages.