Childhood Bilinguals: Linguistic Snapshots of the First School Years in Real Time

ABSTRACT

The current study examines the bilingual language development of twelve young children. We focus on the use of Spanish as a heritage language among the children while they learn English in an English-majority environment. Data was collected in English and Spanish four times over the first two years of formal schooling. The study focuses on oral language production in Spanish and English using several language-eliciting tasks including vocabulary identification and picture storytelling. Results demonstrated improvement in English oral fluency, vocabulary, and grammatical complexity over the two-year period, as expected. Most of the children maintained roughly the same scores on Spanish vocabulary identification and oral fluency over the same timeframe. The study shows that retention of the first language (L1) is achievable even by children living in English-majority neighborhoods.

KEYWORDS:

• Early Childhood
• Dual Language
• Heritage Language
• English language learners
• Latino/a children and families
• Spanish-English contact

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments: We would like to thank the participants in the study, as well as their parents and teachers. A special thanks to Cecilia Cardoza (Speech Lang Pathology, MS) for conducting the PLS tests. Also we appreciate the members of our research team who helped transcribe and code the data for the larger study: Ellie Kaiser, Alice Havrilla, Dave Clark, and Sierra Jensen. We appreciate the anonymous reviewers who provided feedback on all versions of this paper. Any errors that remain are our own.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ The student of Guatemalan descent used two lexical items that were different from the other children, but did not exhibit any pronunciation or grammatical differences from the other children. For example, he was not of an/s/-aspirating dialect. The larger data set included children from dialectal backgrounds who did have considerably more language variation than the twelve participants included for this paper.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the University VPR.

Notes on contributors

Tanya L. Flores

Dr. Tanya L. Flores is a sociolinguist/phonetician and Associate professor of Spanish Linguistics in the department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Utah. Her research focuses on socio-phonetic variation that is motivated by several linguistic and social factors, including phonetic environment, speaker & listener traits, type and origin of discourse, and lexical frequency of spoken words. Her current linguistic projects are on (1) Spanish-English bilingual children, (2) Japanese-Spanish bilinguals and (3) Hispanic hard-of-hearing children.

Maison Evensen-Martinez

Maison Evensen-Martinez is currently a student physician at Rocky Vista University. He is a recent graduate of the University of Utah, where he majored in Spanish. He served as an undergraduate research assistant to Dr. Flores for four years.