Bilingual language acquisition in a minority context: using the Irish–English Communicative Development Inventory to track acquisition of an endangered language

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the role of language exposure in vocabulary acquisition in Irish, a threatened minority language in Ireland which is usually acquired with English in a bilingual context. Using a bilingual Irish–English adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories) [Fenson, L., V. A. Marchman, D. J. Thal, P. S. Dale, J. S. Reznick, and E. Bates. 2007. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. 2nd ed. Baltimore: Brookes], longitudinal parent report data were collected from 34 children (19 girls and 15 boys) at 4-monthly intervals, resulting in 61 data points between the ages of 17–36 months. Language exposure estimates indicated that while the caregivers ‘always’ spoke Irish to the children, both languages were used in most households, with/among siblings and extended family. The children’s vocabulary indicated that they were Irish-dominant in this age range, with more Irish words than English for all vocabulary categories. The analysis also showed no difference in Irish vocabulary scores between children who were ‘usually’ exposed to Irish compared to those with lower exposure rates to Irish. However, there was a significant effect for caregivers’ reported use of English on children’s English scores. The results are discussed in terms of the language input needed to maintain an endangered language and factors to take into account for establishing good estimates of language exposure in a minority language context.

KEYWORDS:

• Irish
• vocabulary
• endangered language
• minority language

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ciara O'Toole is a Lecturer in speech and language therapy in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University College Cork, Ireland. Her teaching and research interests are in the area of paediatric communication development and disorders. She has particular interest in bilingual language acquisition and children who are acquiring Irish as a first/second language.

Tina M. Hickey is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology, University College Dublin, and previously was a researcher in the Linguistics Institute of Ireland (ITÉ). She published the first articles on the L1 acquisition of Irish in international journals, and has continued to research the acquisition of Irish as a first and second language, immersion education in the early years, bilingualism and minority languages, and reading in a second language.

Notes

1. The children were also videotaped interacting with their caregiver in order to obtain a brief spontaneous language sample to determine the validity of the checklists, but these data are not reported here.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by Foras Na Gaeilge [under grant no. 1001197 Sealbhú na Gaeilge ag Naíonáin] awarded to both authors, and was designed as part of COST Action IS0804 Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment (www.bi-sli.org).