Language Acquisition by a Bilingual Child - Essay Example

FACTORS THAT DETERMINE VOCABULARY ACQUISITION IN BILINGUAL CHILDREN by and Factors that Determine Vocabulary Acquisition in Bilingual Children When studying vocabulary acquisition of two languages among bilingual children, researchers focus majorly on the factors contributing to the differences observed. Some of these factors include the degree of exposure and the frequency of exposure to the languages (Heidari-Shahreza et al., 2014, p.43). Studying these factors is very important since children’s language development is very crucial to them at the time they are still development. This is because acquisition of vocabulary in the early stages of development determines an individual’s literary skills later on as they proceed with learning. Of concern to this paper is vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children and the impact that various factors have in determining children’s proficiency in their two languages. While little research exists in this area, a few researchers have since conducted research and came up with interesting results on the role these factors play in their children’s language development. It is also very important to compare the bilingual children with those from the monolingual families to see the extent of vocabulary acquisition of the two, though researches have since indicated that the language scores in bilingual children are lower than the scores of those from monolingual homes (Altarriba & Heredia, 2011, p.170). This calls for more studies so as to know the exact factors that contribute to this difference. In their article, Quiroz et al., (2010) summarise their study findings on the impacts of a mother on the learning outcomes of their children, as regards to mastering the vocabularies of the different languages. The study was conducted mainly to examine the various home factors affecting language acquisition of children of 4-5 years old, in bilingual families. Another question of this research involved the impact of the mother-child book sharing activity in bilingual families, and how it compares with that of the monolingual families. Since this study used Latin American kids from families who also used English as their other langiage, it also endeavoured to find out whether the Spanish vocabulary input also impacted the English vocabulary outcomes. The participants of this study were 250 Spanish-Speaking children. Family samples were from three communities living in Maryland and Massachusetts. A comparison sample comprised 150 children drawn from families living in Puerto Rico. The researchers made sure that the children participated came from families where at least Spanish was one of the languages spoken in the homes. The researchers aimed at examining at a deeper level the factors that influenced the acquisition of language skills in the homes; therefore, they used the scores from various tests that the students took. This helped them to vary the outcomes from the subsamples as much as possible. These scores were deemed to include a variety of skills that the children have in the two different languages. The vocabulary scores from different children were plotted so to identify how the children were distributed in the bilingualism quadrant. After considering all these factors and other factors that made some families to withdraw, the researchers remained with only 50 families for home visit. The home visit was very important because it helped to examine the family characteristics of these homes fully, since this was the main area of interest. Some of the family characteristics that the researchers investigated included those that pertained to the parents of the children such as their country of birth, how long they had stayed in the US, years of education and their language proficiency in the two languages. Among these children, 39 of them were US born while 32 of them had attended child-care in schools where English was used. When the study was conducted, some of the children were attending schools where little or no Spanish was used; others were attending schools where some Spanish was used while others were in schools where just little Spanish was used. Mothers from these homes were born in different countries as well as the fathers. The study mainly relied on interview questions and mothers also filled the vocabulary test questions as well as participating in the book changing activity among other measures that the study utilised. To analyse the data, simple regression analysis was used to find the relationship between language acquisition and the various family characteristics that this study was interested about. The study found out that there were some literacy factors that positively impacted the children’s Spanish language acquisition such as reading with mother and other adults in the family, the extent at which Spanish is used in the school environment, school involvement of the children and how parents communicate with the school. How the children spoke Spanish with their mothers and other siblings also improved their Spanish scores. Children in families where use of Spanish was very frequent showed high scores in Spanish. Interestingly enough, in families where the mother was more English oriented than in Spanish, children indicated low scores in Spanish. Children also showed high scores in English in families where English was widely used. The English proficiency of the mothers also affected positively the children’s English scores (Quiroz et al., 2010, pp.392-93). From their findings, Quiroz et al., (2010) discusses that family features regarding language use affected their children’s language vocabulary outcomes as indicated in the scores. This study found out that there is a relationship between vocabulary acquisition and language specific factors and language general factors. This confirmed the common idea that there must be a competition of vocabulary development in bilingual children, producing a difference in proficiency in one language than the other in developing children_ just as the competition model explains (Norbert, 2013, p.27). Therefore, the Spanish-Speaking children who came from families where English was mostly used showed low performance in Spanish vocabulary acquisition. From the book sharing activity, the study confirms that adult child- interactions do have a positive influence in a child’s general cognitive skills. This study further found out that there is no positive relationship between bilingual acquisition and factors such as family income and extent of education of mother. This relationship is only seen in monolingual families (Quiroz et al., 2010, p.396). This study is very important in our quest to understand the difference in language acquisition that does exist between the Spanish-English bilinguals and the Spanish monolinguals. It has explained the various factors that contribute to this and has confirmed that the competition model is verily applicable in explaining the difference. It has examined the underlying characteristics of language use in homes and schools as the factors that considerably contribute to the difference that we see in these two groups of children. Interestingly, the study found out that when children are being read to, and when they are exposed to frequent labelling questions (in disregard of the language being used to read) the process had a positive influence in vocabulary acquisition of both English and Spanish. It is therefore wise to conclude that encouraging mother-to-child Spanish book interactions would increase a child’s Spanish development as well as laying grounds for English vocabulary acquisition. In their article, Macleod et al., (2013) summarise their research findings on a study conducted to examine how exposure to a language can influence a bilingual child’s language acquisition, as well as the role of parents in a bilingual child’s vocabulary development. The study investigates into the factors that might lead to imbalance in vocabulary development in bilingual children. The main research questions involved finding the extent at which French-Speaking Children are exposed to the two languages used in their families; how vocabulary development in these bilingual children occurs in these two languages at the same time; and whether there is any relationship between the two variables, i.e. the exposure time and the extent at which a child masters vocabularies of the two languages, as well as the difference in the vocabulary size in the two languages compared. This study included 11 simultaneous bilingual children, with the term ‘simultaneous bilingual’ referring to exposure to both French and German languages at the same time from the time the child was born. All the respondents were dwellers of Quebec, where the dominant language is French. The children had a mean age of 52 months and mostly came from an area where French was used as the first language. Moreover, all the children came from bilingual families where both the two languages were used. Only one child had moved from Germany to Canada, while the rest were natives. In these homes, the children received child care in day schools while parents worked full time and only returned home during evenings. All the children used in this study did not have any speech difficulties. The study relied on questionnaires that assessed the child’s language use and exposure. For vocabulary acquisition in German, the researchers used specialised tools to assess the depth of knowledge of common nouns and verbs. This test required a child to identify objects that corresponded to the words the investigator pronounced. The test was reliable for this study since it is a test that had been standardised by 450 children from monolingual families. A similar standardised test was used for the French language vocabulary acquisition test. This study first conducted interviews on the parents so that the children’s history could be established. After the parents’ interview, the children’s receptive vocabulary of both the languages was assessed. On the first day, a French speaking researcher conducted the study while on the third day a French-German bilingual agent carried out the study. Each time the researchers conducted the study, they made sure that the language used during the interaction did not change throughout the session. When analysing the study findings on amount of exposure to each language, the researchers used 12 hours as a standard day. The researchers recorded the amount of time a child was exposed to a given language and dived equally the total number of hours a child was exposed to both the two languages. To assess the extent of vocabulary acquisition, the researchers used the provisions of the tests they used to analyse the right answers to the tests. Since parents from the families worked full time and only came back in the evenings, the kids spent most of their time in day care, making French to receive more number of hours than German in terms of exposure time. German only received 17-29% of the total exposure. Only one child who had moved to Canada from Germany was given day care in German language. Thus the case about him was different since it was a complete opposite of the other cases. The study findings in these homes showed that there was unbalanced exposure to the languages with more children being exposed to German by their mothers while others were exposed to German by their siblings and others being exposed to French also by their siblings. For the most part of the week, the majority of the children were exposed to French, with a percentage of about 71% (Macleod et al., 2013, p.136). The study also found out that the children had more knowledge of German nouns compared to how they mastered the verbs. Otherwise French test scores were average. The overall analysis showed that German was lagging behind in vocabulary acquisition. The study also examined the relationship between vocabulary size in the two languages and the amount of exposure and found out that there was no significant relationship of these variables in German. On the other hand, the study confirmed that the extent of exposure to a given language positively affected the outcomes of the tests in that language, i.e., there was a significant relationship between the exposure time and vocabulary development of French language (Macleod et al., 2013, p.138). The researchers aimed at finding the relationship between vocabulary acquisition and factors such as exposure time. It was in line with past research which had confirmed that vocabulary acquisition is related to the amount of time one spends studying or speaking the language, an individual’s age at the time he or she gets to learn the language, and the status of the language (Simard, 2013, p.385; Thordardottir, 2011, pp.434-36). The study concluded by stating that in families such as the ones studied, it becomes a challenge to parents to monitor successfully the vocabulary acquisition of their children. The one-language one-parent approach does not seem to work for these parents well since they spend their time at work. Therefore for parents who stay in bilingual societies, it is prudent to employ other measures to support the language development of the minority language in their children. These two research works are very important in understanding language development in bilingual children, especially when compared to their monolingual counterparts. It is evident through research that vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children is different from that of monolingual children, therefore these two articles endeavoured to find the underlying factors that bring these differences and have examined it based on the differences brought by the family factors as well as the amount of exposure to the two languages of a bilingual child. Therefore, the articles have explored the issues in an elaborate way, thus contributing to our understanding of the factors that contribute to bilingual language development. However, the first research is more convincing that the second one since it included a larger sample. More research can still be done especially in trying to understand fully how amount of exposure to a language affects a bilingual child living in a bilingual community so as to help parents make proper decisions as they try to aid the children to develop their minority languages fully. References Altarriba, J. & Heredia, R.R., 2011. An Introduction to Bilingualism: Principles and Processes. Psychology Press. Heidari-Shahreza, M.A., Moinzadeh, A. & Barati, H., 2014. The Effect of Exposure Frequency on Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition. GEMA Online Journal of Language Studies, 14(1), pp.43-55. Macleod, A.A., Fabiano-Smith, L., Boegner-Pagé, S. & Fontolliet, S., 2013. Simultaneous bilingual language acquisition: The role of parental input on receptive vocabulary development.. Child Language Teaching & Therapy , 29(1), pp.131-42. Norbert, F., 2013. Bilingual development and literacy learning : East Asian and international perspectives. Hong Kong : City University of Hong Kong Press. Quiroz, B.G., Snow, C.E. & Jing, Z., 2010. Vocabulary skills of Spanish—English bilinguals: impact of mother—child language interactions and home language and literacy support. International Journal of Bilingualism, 14(4), pp.379-99. Simard, D., 2013. Intensive Exposure Experiences in Second Language Learning.. International Journal of Applied Linguistics. Nov2013, Vol. 23 Issue 3, p385-388. 11p. , 23(3), pp.385-88. Thordardottir, E., 2011. The relationship between bilingual exposure and vocabulary development. International Journal of Bilingualism, 15(4), pp.426-45. Read More