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ABSTRACT
The successful acquisition of a heritage language (HL) has been the focus of much of the research on early bi-, tri- and multilingualism in the last years, since it is this language which is generally delimited within the family environment and finds less continuity outside this context once the multilingual child starts socialising in the community (language). Our study contributes to this research by analyzing Spanish and German as HL or majority languages (MaL) and the children’s (receptive) linguistic competence from 86 multilingual children recruited in Germany and Spain (mean age 57.5 months). With the aid of a linguistic background questionnaire, Family Language Policies (FLP), presence/absence of HL in the family, institution and community for 50 of these children were examined. Our study shows that, in early multilingual acquisition, Spanish and German are acquired similarly when enjoying community support, on the one hand, or when being acquired as heritage languages, on the one hand. In these early years, the chosen FLP seems to have an impact on HL-competence, yet up to age 5;0. Other factors, such as the presence of the HL in the institution, act as useful pillars for promoting HL-competence, yet its presence in the family becomes decisive.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 We define language constellation following Arnaus Gil et al. (Citation2020) in order to capture the place the majority language might take in the multilingual child’s immediate environment (i.e., whether it is part of the family’s language strategies or whether it is kept outside the familiar scope).
2 The grant which made this study possible comes from the German Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 232285006) (Laia Arnaus Gil and Natascha Müller).
3 In this sample, the remaining 31 children from 86 acquired either Spanish together with French / Catalan (and other L1s) or German and French (as well as other L1s).
4 Low-average X2 (4, N = 49) = 0.0148, p <.05); average-high X2 (4, N = 69) = 6.1994, p <.05); low-high X2 (4, N = 36) = 0.0001, p <.05).
5 Six out of 93 German receptive vocabulary tests were carried out in a very early stage of our study in which the standardized German Peabody version by Lenhard et al. (Citation2015) was still not available. For these six children acquiring GermanHL, we administered a short version of the Wechsler intelligent test (Petermann & Lipsius, Citation2009), which also assesses receptive vocabulary. The raw values for the Wechsler intelligent test reach a maximum of 31 points and, in this form, they are unfortunately not comparable to the raw scores of the standardized German PPVT by Lenhard et al. (Citation2015). For this reason, we avoided adding the raw scores from the German Wechsler intelligent test in this figure. The raw scores of this test can be converted into age-related scaled scores (Lenhard & Lenhard, Citation2015), which are comparable to the IQ-values provided by the German PPVT.
6 As previously mentioned, such a comparison cannot be drawn for SpanishHL and GermanHL, since we used the German Wechsler intelligent test for the children acquiring GermanHL and their raw scores are not equivalent to the ones from the standardized German and Spanish PPVTs.
7 FLP1*FLP2: t(3) = 2.3534, p>.05; FLP2*FLP3: t(3) = 1.7100, p>.05.
8 FLP1*FLP2: t(5) = 0.3935, p>.05; FLP1*FLP3: t(2) = -0.5714, p>.05; FLP2*FLP3: t(3) = -0.7847, p>.05.
9 Cases in which the MaL was not available in the institution represent those preschools supervised by the Lycée français in Germany and Spain, in which only French is used as lingua franca and, thus, the MaL German and Spanish, respectively, were only supported outside school, i.e., as community languages.
10 Unfortunately, no data for [-family] together with [+institution] is available for Spanish.
11 By contrast, the difference in the mean IQ-values for Spanish as a HL or MaL is 14 IQ-points (as a HL: 102.5; as a MaL: 116.03).
12 FLP1*[±community]: t(12) = -0.8398, p>.05; FLP2*[±community]: t(3) = -0.8864, p>.05; FLP3*[±community]: t(5) = 0.8244, p>.05.
13 FLP1*FLP2: t(4) = 2.6, p<.05; FLP1*FLP3: t(5) = 2.9704, p<.05; FLP2*FLP3: t(7) = 0.9062, p>.05.
14 FLP2 and FLP3 had to be counted together for this analysis due to the small size of these two groups for [-institution] (one child each).
15 Unfortunately, no data for [-institution] together with [-community] are available for German.