Relative language exposure and bilingual children’s linguistic skills in the school years

Dr. Ludovica Serratrice - The University of Manchester

 

 

Bilingual children’s language experience is, by its very nature, distributed across two languages. The contexts in which they hear and use one language may only partially overlap with those contexts in which they hear and use their other language. In addition, both the relative amount of time they spend in one language context or another will be different for different children. Some bilingual children have a relatively balanced exposure to two languages, while others hear and/or use one language much more frequently than the other.

 

Relative amount of language exposure has been repeatedly shown to be a reliable predictor of bilingual children’s early vocabulary skills in each language.  In this talk I will present work on bilingual children who are past the early stages of acquisition (6- to 10-year-olds). I will show that the relative amount of language exposure – operationalized as the language of the community – is a significant predictor of differences in bilingual children’s interpretation of aspects of language that require sophisticated morpho-syntactic, semantic and discourse-pragmatic skills.

 

These findings will add to the knowledge base on childhood bilingualism in the school years and will inform expectations on similarities and differences between bilingual and monolingual child speakers.