No Language Trade-Off: Bilingual Children Reliably Acquire English by Age 5
upstart writes:
No language trade-off: Bilingual children reliably acquire English by age 5:
In the United States, more than 12 million children hear a minority language at home from birth. More than two-thirds hear English as well, and they reach school age with varying levels of proficiency in two languages. Parents and teachers often worry that acquiring Spanish will interfere with children's acquisition of English.
A first-of-its-kind study in U.S.-born children from Spanish-speaking families led by researchers at Florida Atlantic University finds that minority language exposure does not threaten the acquisition of English by children in the U.S. and that there is no trade-off between English and Spanish. Rather, children reliably acquire English, and their total language knowledge is greater to the degree that they also acquire Spanish.
Results of the study, published in the journal Child Development, show that children with the most balanced bilingualism were those who heard the most Spanish at home and who had parents with high levels of education in Spanish.
Importantly, these children did not have lower English skills than the English-dominant children. Children's level of English knowledge was independent of their level of Spanish knowledge. U.S.-born children who live in Spanish-speaking homes and who also are exposed to English from infancy tend to become English dominant by age 5-but some more so than others.
Journal Reference:
Erika Hoff, Michelle K. Tulloch, Cynthia Core. Profiles of MinorityMajority Language Proficiency in 5YearOlds, Child Development (DOI: 10.1111/cdev.13591)
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