How childhood languages shape future language use and cultural orientation

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we investigate the effect that parents’ language use (English, Spanish-English or Spanish) had on self-perceived proficiency, frequency of use, language anxiety, code-switching and cultural orientation of 206 Spanish-English bilinguals and multilinguals who were students in Texas where there is a strong presence of Spanish, the minority language. Our results showed that languages that parents had used with their children had a privileged status: bilinguals and multilinguals reported higher levels of proficiency, more frequent use, less anxiety (except for English) and a stronger cultural orientation. The effect was strongest for parents with Spanish-speaking parents. The scores of the simultaneous bilinguals were generally situated between the scores of the sequential Spanish-English and English-Spanish bilinguals from monolingual families. We conclude that relatively more or less use of a particular language in a family home will lead to significant differences in the grown-up children’s future language use and cultural orientation.

KEYWORDS:

• Proficiency
• frequency of use
• language anxiety
• code-switching
• cultural orientation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jean-Marc Dewaele

Jean-Marc Dewaele, PhD, is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism at Birkbeck, University of London. He has published widely on individual differences in psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, pragmatic, psychological and emotional variables in Second Language Acquisition and Multilingualism. He is former president of the International Association of Multilingualism and the European Second Language Association. He is the former General Editor of the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism and the current General Editor of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. He won the Equality and Diversity Research Award from the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (2013) and the Robert Gardner Award for Excellence in Second Language and Bilingualism Research (2016) from the International Association of Language and Social Psychology.

Roberto Heredia

Roberto Heredia, PhD, is Regents Professor in the Department of Psychology and Communication at Texas A&M International University. He served as chair of the Department of Behavioral Sciences for two years. He was director and principal investigator of a multimillion-dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Education. He has published on bilingual memory, bilingual lexical representation, bilingual nonliteral language processing, stereotype processing, and evolutionary psychology. He is co-author of Bilingual Sentence Processing, An Introduction to Bilingualism: Principles and Processes, (2nd ed.)., Foundations of Bilingual Memory, Bilingual Figurative Language Processing, guest editor for Experimental Psychology; and series-editor and co-founder of Springer’s Bilingual Mind and Brain Book Series.

Anna Cieślicka

Anna Cieślicka, PhD, is Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology and Communication at Texas A&M International University (TAMIU) and Director of the MS in the Psychology Graduate Program. Her research focuses mainly on the psycholinguistics of second/foreign language acquisition and processing, bilingual lexicon, figurative language, and neuropsychology of bilingualism. She is recipient of TAMIU’s Teacher of the Year and Scholar of the Year Awards and the recipient and principal investigator of a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation research grant to establish the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory and study the neurophysiology of bilingual language processing. She is co-editor of Bilingual Figurative Language Processing, as well as co-founder and co-editor of The Bilingual Mind and Brain Book Series, published by Springer.