Poster #47 - Caregiver-Child Language Synchrony Across two Bilingual Communities

• In Event: Poster Session 03

Abstract

Bilingual children grow up exposed to two (or more) languages. However, they will only become competent users of their languages if they receive enough exposure to each of their languages (Place & Hoff, 2011). To better understand how bilingual language input influences children’s language abilities, bilingual research has focused on documenting variability in caregivers’ input such as the amount and richness of language input directed to the child (Ramírez-Esparza, et al., 2017), the strategies used by caregivers when speaking multiple languages (Orena et al., 2019), the quantity and type of code-switching between languages (Kremin, et al., 2020), and caregivers’ attitudes towards bilingualism (Kircher, et al., 2022). Language input occurs bidirectionally, where caregiver(s) and children engage in a conversational exchange. In bilingual adult conversations, interlocutors adapt their language choice to each other, but the degree to which this occurs in interactions within bilingual families is unknown. In this cross-community investigation, we examined synchrony between children’s and caregiver’s productions in each of their two languages within a naturalistic free play context. We asked: 1) are parents and children matched in the proportion of productions they produce in each language; 2) does this vary by the presence of different caregivers; 3) does this vary across bilingual communities in which languages have different perceived status.

Data from forty 18-35-month-old bilingual homes were collected. So far data from 11 French-English bilingual families in Canada and 10 Spanish-English bilingual families in the United States have been coded, transcribed and analyzed. We recorded infants (via Zoom) in their homes during two 20-minute free play sessions, which yielded natural samples of language use (Bergelson et al., 2019; Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2017). On the first day, infants played with only their primary caregiver. On the second day, additional household members were present (e.g., other parents, siblings, nannies). We coded onsets and offsets of all utterances and tagged each for speaker identity and language. To quantify language use, we calculated the proportion of utterances in each language (English, French, and Spanish) each day, both for children and for their caregivers.

Preliminary analyses show that language use is consistent on Day 1 between a single caregiver and the target child in both French-English (R = 0.85, p < 0.001) and Spanish-English families (R = 0.77, p = 0.016) with caregivers and children using their languages in similar proportions. However, on Day 2, when multiple caregivers were present, only French-English families showed synchrony in the proportion of time children and caregivers used each language (R = 0.59, p = 0.034). Spanish-English bilingual families did not show significant synchrony (R = 0.31, p = 0.377).

Overall, these findings suggest a high degree of synchrony between bilingual caregivers and their children, which nonetheless varies by the presence of different caregivers and by language community. Future analyses are planned to examine whether parents, children, or both are adapting their language choice, and whether this synchrony can be detected in smaller timescales, for example across conversational turns.

Authors

• Laia Fibla, Concordia University
  Presenting Author

• Jessica Elizabeth Kosie, Princeton University

• Rachel Ka-Ying Tsui, RIKEN Center for Brain Science

• Taylor Martinez, Princeton University

• Andrea Sander-Montant, Concordia University

• Christine Potter, University of Texas at El Paso

• Casey Lew-Williams, Princeton University

• Krista Byers-Heinlein, Concordia University