 Individual differences and language interdependence: a study of sequential bilingual development in Spanish-English preschool children

Bilinguals  2 types  Simultaneous bilinguals -children who learn two languages from birth  Sequential bilinguals -children who are later introduced to a second language (after the age of 3)

Details of the study  Evaluated whether performance in a first language predicts success in the acquisition of a second language nine months after exposure to the second language begins  Forty-nine Spanish-speaking children attending English-only pre-kindergarten classrooms  No productive expressive English oral skills at beginning of year  Spanish was only language spoken at home

Arguments  Debate as to whether there is autonomy or interdependence between languages in simultaneous bilingual acquisition  Language interdependence -the systemic influence of the grammar of one language on the grammar of the other language during acquisition, causing differences in bilingual’s patterns and rates of development in comparison with monolingual’s  Germanic languages have an influence on Romance languages with respect to the object drop

Predictions  Native language skills predict the success in second language acquisition, not because of linguistic transfer, but by virtue of individual differences in language learning abilities present in typical populations

Assessment-Spanish  Assessed in Spanish at the beginning of the school year  Native Spanish speaker read a story to kids (individually) while they looked at the pictures from the story  Kids were asked to retell the story using the pictures  Responses were recorded and graded as ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’

Assessment-English  Assessed in English nine months later  Same test given in English by native English speaker  Correct answers were reinforced by stickers  When Spanish answers were given, English was encouraged

Findings  Significant correlations between semantic and grammatical measures across languages  Possibility that different linguistic properties might have stronger relationships with each other at different ages  Child’s L2 will take years to catch up to the same levels as their L1  Not consistent with other research

Conclusion  Study indicates that in sequential bilingual preschool children, there is a strong relationship between Spanish as an L1 and English as an L2

References  International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism  Vol. 12, No. 5, September 2009,  Anny Patricia Castilla, Maria Adelaida Restrepob, and Ana Teresa Perez-Leroux  r/pdfviewer?sid=8a2b5e81-7a af15- d35f %40sessionmgr114&vid=1&hid=127 r/pdfviewer?sid=8a2b5e81-7a af15- d35f %40sessionmgr114&vid=1&hid=127