Active bi- and trilingualism and its influencing factors

ABSTRACT

This article examines factors that promote active multilingualism. For this purpose, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test was used with 48 children. Their results were linked to a parental questionnaire designed to evaluate the children’s linguistic input in their immediate environment. The study shows that, besides a minimum amount of linguistic input, the language constellation (i.e. presence/absence of the majority language at home) is also decisive. At the same time, it seems irrelevant for active bi- and trilingualism which family language policies are chosen (e.g. One person-One Language), as long as the promotion of the minority language does not only take place institutionally, but also at home. Overall, the results indicate that attending a bilingual kindergarten/school alone does not lead to active multilingualism. Family factors and family support seem to be decisive. These include the creation of a linguistically stimulating environment through cultural contact and the language constellation within the family.

KEYWORDS:

• Active early child trilingualism
• amount of input
• quality of input
• size of (receptive) vocabulary
• minority/majority language

List of abbreviations

LS Language Strategy

Min. Minimum

Max. Maximum

MaL Majority Language

MiL Minority Language

LoF Language of Family

SES Socio-Economic Status

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ In her work on early trilingualism, Chevalier (2015, p. 4) coins the concept of active trilingualism in order to define those children who are able to speak 3L1s. One possible synonym for this concept is that of being productive in their three L1s. Cf. section 2 for a further discussion of this term along the methodology used to approach active multilingualism in our own research study.

² As one reviewer notes, it could be the case that both parents decide to speak another language to the child rather than the L1. In this case, if this language equals the MaL, the result would be a monolingual child. If the parents decide to speak another language which is not the MaL, the child would be raised bilingually (Type 5 in Romaine, 1995 typology).

³ The grant which made this study available comes from the German Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 232285006) (Laia Arnaus Gil and Natascha Müller).

⁴ The grammatical tasks consisted of eliciting the bi-, tri- and multilingual children’s placement of subjects in French (Arnaus Gil & Müller, 2018b), adjective placement in Spanish and French (Arnaus Gil, Zimmermann, Tirado Espinosa, & Müller, 2020), the placement of finite verbs in German (Arnaus Gil & Müller, 2018a) and the use of ser and estar in Spanish and Catalan (Arnaus Gil, Jiménez-Gaspar, & Müller, 2018; Kleineberg, Arnaus Gil, & Müller, 2020).

⁵ Admittedly, it is problematic to use a translation of the French PPVT in order to examine the children’s vocabulary size in Catalan. Such practice may result in obtaining items which are close in meaning, but do not necessarily correspond with respect to other criteria, e.g. structural word complexity, cultural interpretation, familiarity, or frequency of occurrence (Peña, 2007). Nevertheless, looking at the French and Spanish PPVT in detail, even though the norming sample and the total number of test items differ, the distribution of the standard scores and the linguistic categories are the same (cf. Dunn et al., 1986, p. 40, 1993, p. 37). Since no other solution was available at the time of testing, the Catalan translation of the French and the Spanish PPVT were thus implemented in order to measure the Catalan receptive vocabulary. To date, a standardized version of the PPVT in Catalan is lacking.

⁶ In the case of siblings, we are well aware, as one reviewer points out, that older siblings might not necessarily use the MiL at home with younger siblings and, therefore, the amount of input in the MaL increases. A specific question in the parental questionnaire (cf. Appendix) actually aimed at asking for this information, namely, which language the siblings normally use among them.

⁷ Unfortunately, the parental questionnaire did not employ the Likert scale to ask for the child’s actual interaction and so the parents had the possibility to freely fill in the questionnaire, something that made the analysis of the information in the questionnaire difficult and complicated the application of statistical procedures. Therefore, the assignment of different values had to be carried out rather arbitrarily and had to consider all possible parental answers. See the Appendix for a detailed description of the factors and the assignment of values for each factor. Notice, however, that our attempt to quantify is of little importance in absolute terms; it simply allowed a comparative analysis.

⁸ For scoring, see Appendix, section 9.1.

⁹ It should be noted that no information is available on the interactional potential of the medium, since the question on the use of media could only be answered with “yes” or “no” in the parent questionnaire. We therefore cannot assess whether media use is reducible, for example, to simply read books together in the MiL or whether books were used to initiate a conversation about the contents among the family members.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Science Foundation [232285006].