Validity of parents’ classifications of bilingual children’s language dominance

ABSTRACT

Bilingual children’s dominance can predict a variety of language and cognitive outcomes. The purpose of this study was to test the validity of parents’ classifications of 3- to 6-year-old bilingual children’s dominance against relative receptive vocabulary scores. In Study 1, the parents’ classifications of Mandarin-English bilingual children’s dominance corresponded to relative vocabulary scores only for children reported to be very Mandarin dominant. Similar results were obtained in Study 2 with French-English bilinguals and very French dominant children. We argue these results reflect well-known estimation processes and that asking parents to judge each language separately might yield more valid results.

KEYWORDS:

• Language dominance
• parental report
• validity
• bilingual first language acquisition
• childhood bilingualism
• language proficiency

Acknowledgements

The first author of this paper received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to carry out this research. We would like to thank all of the children and parents who participated in this study. Zixia Jiang, Nathalie Savoie, Yuehan Yang, and Catherine Zoleta helped with recruitment and data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Elena Nicoladis

Elena Nicoladis is a professor of psychology at the University of Alberta. Her research interests include bilingual first language development and gestures.

Anastassija Mimovic

Anastassija Mimovic was an honours student in psychology when she worked on this study.