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Quebec-based parents' concerns regarding their children's multilingual development.
Erin Quirk1, Melanie Brouillard1, Alexa Ahooja2
1Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Parents raising multilingual children have concerns about language exposure and fluency, and less so about cognitive effects. Factors like heritage language transmission and parental attitudes influence concern levels.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Sociolinguistics
- Child Development
Background:
- Parental concerns regarding children's multilingual development are common but under-researched, particularly in multilingual communities.
- Existing knowledge lacks detail on the specific nature and intensity of these parental concerns.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the nature and strength of concerns among parents of young children (0-4 years) undergoing multilingual development.
- To identify factors associated with heightened parental concerns about childhood multilingualism.
Main Methods:
- A pre-registered, questionnaire-based study involving 821 parents in Quebec raising multilingual infants and toddlers.
- Factor analysis was used to analyze Likert-scale responses assessing parental concerns.
Main Results:
- Parents reported two main types of concerns: (1) impact of multilingualism on cognition and (2) exposure to and fluency in multiple languages.
- Overall concern strength was moderate to weak, with cognition concerns being less pronounced than exposure-fluency concerns.
- Stronger concerns were linked to heritage language transmission, raising three or more languages, developmental issues, and less positive parental attitudes.
Conclusions:
- Findings enhance understanding of parental concerns in multilingual contexts, highlighting a greater focus on language acquisition than cognitive effects.
- Identified factors provide a basis for developing targeted support strategies for multilingual families.
- The study underscores the importance of parental attitudes in shaping concerns about childhood multilingualism.

