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Individual Differences in Bilingual Child Language Acquisition: A plunge into a Complex and Dynamic Network
1Department of English Literature and Linguistics / The Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University (Israel).
Journal of Child Language
|February 3, 2023
Summary
Bilingual children show significant variations in language skills, impacting their heritage language (HL) or societal language (SL) development. These differences are more pronounced than in monolingual children, even in those with typical development or language disorders.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Developmental Psychology
- Child Language Acquisition
Background:
- Individual differences in language skills are well-established in monolingual children.
- These variations are even more pronounced in bilingual children, affecting either their Heritage Language (HL) or Societal Language (SL).
- Significant differences are observed in both neurotypical bilingual children and those with developmental language disorders, autism spectrum disorder, or hearing impairment.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate and visualize the extent of individual differences in morphosyntactic skills among bilingual children.
- To compare the language variation in bilingual children with that of monolingual children.
- To analyze how different levels of language dominance (balanced, HL-dominant, SL-dominant) influence these variations.
Main Methods:
- Utilized LITMUS Sentence Repetition tasks to assess morphosyntactic skills.
- Analyzed data from monolingual and bilingual children aged 5;5-6;8 with typical language development.
- Categorized bilingual children based on standardized tests into balanced bilinguals (BB), HL dominant (HL-D), and SL dominant (SL-D).
Main Results:
- Monolingual preschool children exhibited minimal variation in morphosyntactic skills.
- Bilingual children displayed substantial individual differences in their language skills, both within and across their two languages.
- These large variations were evident across different bilingual groups, including balanced, HL-dominant, and SL-dominant children.
Conclusions:
- Bilingualism is associated with a wider range of individual differences in language development compared to monolingualism.
- Language dominance plays a role in shaping the pattern of language variation in bilingual children.
- Understanding these individual differences is crucial for both typical and atypical language development in bilingual contexts.
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