A Simplified Approach to Quantifying a Child's Bilingual Language Experience

Purpose Bilingual children's linguistic experience can vary markedly from child to child. For appropriate audiological assessment and intervention, audiologists need accurate and efficient ways to describe and understand a bilingual child's dynamic linguistic experience. This report documents an approach for quantitatively capturing a child's language exposure and usage in a time-efficient manner. Method A well-known pediatric bilingual language survey was administered to 83 parents of bilingual children, obtaining information about the child's exposure to (input) and usage of (output) Spanish and English for seventeen 1-hr intervals during a typical weekday and weekend day. Results A factor analysis indicated that capturing linguistic exposure and usage over three grouped-time intervals during a typical weekday and weekend day accounted for ≥ 74% of the total variance of the linguistic information captured with the full-length survey. Conclusions Although further confirmation is required, these results suggest that collecting language exposure and usage data from parents of bilingual children for three grouped-time intervals provides similar information as a comprehensive hour-by-hour approach. A time-efficient method of capturing the dynamic bilingual linguistic experience of a child would benefit pediatric audiologists and speech-language pathologists alike.