Session Information
31 SES 10, Understanding Home Language Use in Multilingual Families and its Implications for Education Research
Symposium
Contribution
The language input that bilingual children receive within the family is a crucial determinant of their language development process. This presentation first discusses macro-level findings based on a study with 2,250 multilingual families involving Dutch in combination with about 73 minority languages. This study highlights the importance of parental input patterns for children's minority language use. Micro-level findings from a longitudinal study of the language input to 31 very young French-Dutch bilingual children indicate that, contrry to what is often assumed, bilingual input does not consist of twice half the input that monolingual children receive. They also show the highly dynamic and changing nature of parental input in the preschool years. Implications for research and bilingual child rearing are discussed.
References
De Houwer, A. (2004). Trilingual input and children's language use in trilingual families in Flanders’. In C. Hoffmann & J. Ytsma, eds., Trilingualism in the Individual, Family and Society, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 118-138. De Houwer, A. (2007). Parental language input patterns and children's bilingual use. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28(3): 411-424. De Houwer, A. (2009) Bilingual First Language Acquisition. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, xvii + 412 pp. De Houwer, A. (2011). Language input environments and language development in bilingual acquisition. Applied Linguistics Review, 2: 221-240. De Houwer, A. (2014). The absolute frequency of maternal input to bilingual and monolingual children: a first comparison. In T. Grüter & J. Paradis (eds.), Input and Experience in Bilingual Development, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 37-58. De Houwer, A. & Bornstein, M.H. (submitted). Maternal language choice in bilingual families: The relation with children's speech status.
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