Poster #116 - What and when individual differences matter: bio-ecological influences in early language and literacy development

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

Factors that explain individual differences in language acquisition have been studied in details for monolingual child first language learners and adult second language learners (Dörnyei & Skehan, 2003; Hoff, 2006), but they have not been studied extensively in child bilingual learners until recent years (Chondrogianni & Marinis, 2011; Paradis, 2011; Unsworth, Hulk, & Marinis, 2011). Those studies focused on early bilingual language and literacy development tended to explore the significance of individual predictors but not adopted a comprehensive view to examine them as a whole. The comprehensive perspective is crucial as development is probabilistic and a model without taking the internal-external linkage could be misleading (Bornstein & Leventhal, 2015). The linkage could be both at the level of individual factors (i.e., threshold effects; Sunderman & Kroll, 2009) and at the level of a group of factors (i.e. relative weight; Sun, Yin, Asmesh, & O’Brien, 2018).
The current study examined the impact of internal factors (e.g., learning related social skills) and external factors (e.g., input quantity) in tandem on the rate of child bilingual’s English development in phonological awareness (PA), receptive vocabulary (RV) and word reading (WR). By employing the internal-external factors hypothesis, the threshold effects hypothesis, and the relative weight hypothesis, we hope to develop a consistent research procedure to address the intersection of individual abilities and the learning environment. There are three focuses of the study, namely 1) the relative importance of theses internal and external factors, 2) the interaction of the best internal and external predictors, and 3) the relative contributions of internal versus external factors as two sets in different language and literacy domains. 736 Singaporean Mandarin-English speaking children (4;1-5;6 years old) were assessed at Kindergarten 1 and Kindergarten 2 in PA, RV, and WR. Their knowledge growth were predicted using a series of internal factors (e.g., working memory, learning related social skills) and external factors (e.g., maternal education, home language input) in a fully Bayesian framework with penalized regression techniques (Table 1). The results revealed that firstly, both internal and external factors contribute to the growth of PA, RV, and WR. Nonverbal intelligence, learning related social skills, and mother’s education are particularly influential across the three language domains (Figure 1a). Secondly, the advance of nonverbal intelligence and learning related social skills merged the gaps of phonological awareness for children from different SES background, but exacerbated the differences for the same children group in their development of receptive vocabulary and word reading skills (Figure 1b). Thirdly, the internal factors explained more variance than external factors across all three language domains, but the difference between the two sets of predictors is more substantial for children’s development of phonological awareness and word reading skills (Figure 1c). The contribution of the two sets are similar for children’s receptive vocabulary. We attributed the variation across language domains to the nature of the content learning. The acquisition of phonological awareness is more structural based, and that of receptive vocabulary is more item based, leaving the development of word reading in between.

Authors

• He Sun, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University
  Presenting Author

• Donald Williams, University of California
  Non-Presenting Author

• Bin Yin, University of British Columbia
  Non-Presenting Author