Poster #39 - Interrelations among and between Vocabulary and Grammar in Spanish-English and Japanese-English Bilingual Toddlers

• In Event: Poster Session 04

Abstract

This study examined interrelations among vocabulary and grammar in middle- and high-income Spanish-English simultaneous bilingual toddlers with origins in South America (n = 37) and Japanese-English simultaneous bilingual 20-month-old toddlers (n = 39). Participants were healthy firstborn singletons and their mothers living in the United States. It is important to study interrelations among vocabulary and grammar within and across languages because doing so can inform discussions about the extent to which language learning is influenced by innate capacities of the child (in which case relations between vocabulary and grammar within and across languages would be expected) or environmental factors (in which case relations between vocabulary and grammar within languages would be expected but cross-language relations would not).
Mothers completed a vocabulary checklist for each language (reported vocabulary size), and mothers and toddlers were observed playing with a standard toy set for 10 min. The behavioral observation (play session) was transcribed by bilingual researchers using CHAT (MacWhinney, 2000). Toddlers’ utterances were coded as heritage language, English, or bilingual, and separated into different files using GEM, then language-specific MOR programs were used to segment morphemes. CLAN (MacWhinney, 2000) was used to generate measures of vocabulary (observed vocabulary size, word types and tokens, TTR) and grammar (MLU-Words and MLU-Morphemes) in the heritage languages and English.
Pearson correlations explored relations among indices of toddlers’ vocabulary and grammatical development in their heritage language (Spanish for South American toddlers and Japanese for Japanese American toddlers, Table 1) and in English (Table 2). Strong, positive, and statistically significant (α < .05) relations were found for many of the language measures and for both cultural groups. Notably, reported and observed vocabulary measures (types and tokens) were significantly interrelated for both the heritage language (Table 1) and English (Table 2) for both South American and Japanese American bilingual toddlers, but TTR was not. Thus, maternal report is a robust measure of vocabulary across the languages studied and for bilingual toddlers. Consistent with previous research on Spanish-English bilingual toddlers hailing from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean (Conboy & Thal, 2006; Hoff et al., 2018; Marchman et al., 2004), measures of grammar were significantly positively interrelated for both the heritage languages (Table 1) and English (Table 2) in this study; moreover, relations between vocabulary and grammar were found within languages for both South American and Japanese American toddlers. A final set of Pearson correlations explored relations across languages (heritage and English) for each of the language measures; no significant relations were found (rs ranged from -.31 to .28, all ps > .05) suggesting that bilingual toddlers’ languages develop independently.
This study increases our understanding of lexical and grammatical development among bilingual toddlers by extending previous findings for Spanish-English bilingual toddlers to children originating in South America and to a new language pair (Japanese and English). Despite the fact that Japanese and English are more linguistically distant than Spanish and English, which can make bilingual language learning more challenging (Floccia, 2018), similar patterns of findings emerged for both bilingual groups.

Authors

• Linda R Cote, Marymount University
  Presenting Author

• Karen Y. Espinal, Marymount University

• Marc H Bornstein, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD/NIH)