Poster #69 - Changing Influences on Bilingual Development from Preschool to Adolescence: Home is Where the Spanish Is

• In Event: Poster Session 01

Abstract

Introduction: In the preschool years, the rates at which children in bilingual homes acquire each of their languages is substantially predicted by the balance of their dual language exposure at home. Influences on bilingual oral language growth have been less studied past early childhood. The present study makes use of longitudinal data to describe home language exposure, Spanish and English language skills, and the relation of those dual language skills to home language exposure in children from Spanish-speaking families.
Method: The participants were 39 US-born children living in South Florida (23 females), who had at least one parent born in a Spanish-country. Thirty-nine of the mothers and 24 of the fathers were foreign born. The children’s language exposure and language development had been assessed annually from the age of 5 years. The present analyses make use of data collected when the children were 5 years old (M = 60.44 months, SD = .56) and 13 years old (M = 158.57 months, SD = 1.31). Table 1 provides descriptive statistics on mothers’ educational attainment in Spanish and English and estimates of the participants’ relative exposure to Spanish and English at home at each time point, provided by the mother in interview, and on measures of the participants’ expressive and receptive vocabularies from examiner-administered tests.
Data analysis: Hierarchical regression modeled the relation of relative language exposure at home and maternal educational attainment in the outcome language to the participants’ expressive and receptive vocabulary in each language at each age. In these analyses, relative exposure was entered first. Maternal education was entered second, treated as a continuous variable on a scale of 0 = no school attendance to 5 = advanced degree for Spanish and treated as a dichotomous variable in which 0 = no schooling and 1 = some schooling for English, because 50% of the mothers had no schooling in English.
Results: At 5 years, home language exposure was a significant source of variance in Spanish and English expressive and receptive vocabulary. At 13 years, home exposure predicted Spanish but not English. Maternal education additionally contributed to variance only in Spanish expressive vocabulary at 13 years. Figure 1 plots the variance accounted for in each outcome at each age by the relative amount of home exposure to that language.
Discussion: The present findings with respect to English skills are consistent with descriptions of monolingual development in which the influence of home experience declines with age as the influence of peers grows. The present finding of the continued importance of home language experience to adolescents’ Spanish language skills is new, but consistent with the well-documented vulnerability of heritage language development among second-generation immigrants. It is noteworthy that the present findings are based on sample from South Florida where Spanish use is widespread, including on radio, television, smart phone apps, and more. The environmental ubiquitous of Spanish notwithstanding, the maintenance of Spanish depends on its use at home.  

Authors

• Heather Johnson, Florida Atlantic University
  Presenting Author

• Erika Hoff, Florida Atlantic University