The impact of a first-generation immigrant environment on the heritage language: productive vocabularies of Polish toddlers living in the UK and Ireland

ABSTRACT

The expressive lexical skills of 53 Polish bilinguals aged 24–36 months living in the UK and Ireland were assessed using Polish and British English adaptations of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. Polish vocabulary scores were compared to those of 53 Polish monolinguals matched for age, gender and parental education. The bilinguals were born to two Polish parents and mostly lived outside Poland since birth. Results showed substantial differences in Total Conceptual Vocabulary and single-language vocabulary scores between the groups. However, the groups did not differ on Total Vocabulary measures. In the bilingual sample, there were significant correlations between children’s frequency of language use and their vocabulary scores in the same language. A negative correlation between children’s frequency of English use and their Polish vocabulary scores was found. A complex pattern of factors relating to children’s low performance in Polish emerged. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that low birth weight, parental concern about language, maternal educational level as well as maternal frequency of Polish and English use contributed to explaining children’s Polish vocabulary scores. Overall, results indicated the need for early additional support of the first language (L1) if long-term balanced bilingualism is to be attained.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual vocabulary
• CDI
• immigration
• Polish
• English

Acknowledgments

The bilingual part of this study was designed within COST Action IS0804 Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment (www.bi-sli.org).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Aneta Miękisz was awarded a B.A. in Psychology by the University of Texas at Austin, USA and a M.A. in Psychology by the University of Warsaw, Poland. She is currently working on her Ph.D. research, which focuses on bilingual first language acquisition, at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, where she also teaches on academic difficulties and their assessment.

Ewa Haman holds a Ph.D. in developmental psycholinguistics. Presently she is working at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw. Her research interests include lexical development in monolingual and bilingual children. She is the co-author of a normed vocabulary test for Polish children (OTSR) and co-designer of the Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLT) for bilingual children, currently available in 25 languages (following collaboration within COST Action IS0804 Bi-SLI; http://psychologia.pl/clts/).

Magdalena Łuniewska is a PhD student at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, and at Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Polish Academy of Sciences. Her research interest includes language acquisition under typical and impaired conditions.

Katarzyna Kuś is an assistant professor at the Philosophy Institute of the Warsaw University and a teacher of Polish as a foreign language. Her research interests are in the area of experimental philosophy, linguistic semantics and philosophy of language. She conducts research on the cross-cultural differences in folk taxonomies.

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.

Napoleon Katsos is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics of the University of Cambridge. He conducts research on the acquisition and processing of lexical and sentential meaning in monolingual and bilingual children and adults.

Notes

1. Heritage language speakers: those who were born in an L2 environment to immigrant parents (Montrul 2008; Schmid 2011).

Additional information

Funding

The authors express their gratitude to organisations which supported various activities connected with this research, namely the University of Warsaw Foundation and COST Action IS0804. Data collection was partly financed by two grants: for monolingual data, Grant no. N N106 051436 from the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education ‘Badania Nad Rozwojem Słownika Umysłowego u Dzieci w Wieku 2–6 lat (etap 2.)’ [Studies in the Development of the Mental Lexicon in Children aged 2–6 (Part 2)]; for bilingual data, Grant no. 809/N-COST/2010/0 from the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education/National Science Centre ‘Rozwój Poznawczy i Językowy Polskich Dzieci Dwujęzycznych u Progu Edukacji Szkolnej – Szanse i Zagrożenia’ [‘Cognitive and Linguistic Development of Polish Bilingual Children: Risk and Opportunities at the School Entrance Age’].