Poster #49 - Bilingual Development in the Receptive and Expressive Domains: They Differ

• In Event: Poster Session 10

Abstract

In bilingual children, more so than in monolingual children, comprehension abilities exceed production abilities. While this receptive-expressive gap in bilinguals has been well documented, little is known about its development. The available evidence suggests that the course of dual language development may be different in the expressive and receptive domains, particularly when one language is a heritage language and the other a societal language. However, few direct tests exist, and none examine growth across a 6-year period of language development. The aim of the present study was to fill this gap and to directly test the hypothesis that bilingual development in the expressive domain differs from bilingual development in the receptive domain using longitudinal data on the receptive and expressive vocabulary skills of 52 Spanish-English bilingual children who were assessed at the ages of 4.5 and 10 years. English and Spanish expressive and receptive skills were assessed separately by the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test-Spanish Bilingual Edition (EOWPVT, Brownell, 2001a) and the Receptive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test-Spanish Bilingual Edition (ROWPVT, Brownell, 2001b). The children were born in the United States and had one (n = 16) or two (n = 36) foreign-born parents who were native Spanish speakers. Their home language exposure at 4.5 was, on average, 37% English and 63% Spanish, but ranged from 15% to 100% Spanish. Because the measures of expressive and receptive skill are not comparable, we conducted two separate 2(Age) × 2(Language) repeated measures ANOVAs, one with expressive skills and the other with receptive skills as the outcome, and then compared the effects observed in each. The results revealed that the children’s English vocabularies grew faster than their Spanish vocabularies, more so in the expressive domain than the receptive domain, the partial eta squared for the Age × Language interaction was 1.9 times greater for expressive than receptive skill. Expressive and receptive scores are plotted in Figure 1. Next, we examined whether English dominance increases with age more in the expressive than receptive domain. The results revealed that the proportion of children who were English-dominant also increased more in the expressive than the receptive domain. By age 10, the children’s expressive skills were almost always English dominant while their receptive skills were most frequently balanced. Figure 2 plots the frequencies of language dominance in each domain at 4.5 and 10 years. The findings from the present study provide clear evidence that among children who hear a heritage language at home and a societal language at school, trajectories of dual language development differs in the expressive and receptive domains. Specifically, these findings add to growing literature that finds that bilingual children’s acquisition of the societal language outpaces their acquisition of the heritage language from an early age— more so with respect to expressive language skills than with respect to receptive language skills. Finally, these longitudinal data suggest continuity between the receptive-expressive gap observed in bilingual children and the receptive bilingualism often observed in adults.

Authors

• David Giguere, California State University - Sacramento
  Presenting Author

• Erika Hoff, Florida Atlantic University