DUAL LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AMONG HISPANIC PRESCHOOLERS IN BILINGUAL SETTINGS

Research on the language acquisition of young bilinguals has been largely limited to case studies or, when larger studies have been undertaken, has tended to consider bilingual children as a single group. This study examines the differing degrees of bilingualism among a sample of 89 preschool children from low income Hispanic families living in bilingual environments. Results suggest that there is no price to be paid for being bilingual and that bilingual children differ significantly from each other when compared in terms of their preferred language. The acquisition of two languages by young children and the adaptation of educational programs to meet the needs of children who are dominant in a language other than English are two of the more complex problems facing educators in many parts of the United States. Although in recent years there has been a proliferation of studies examining either the process by which two languages are acquired or the sociolinguistic factors influencing dual language acquisition, the general extent of the phenomenon remains unclear. Much of the research undertaken both in the United States and elsewhere has been of the case study variety, in which linguists have created a dual language environment for, or studied the effects of the natural environment on, their own children becoming bilingual. Early research suggests that a child's awareness of dealing with two languages develops very early, with minimum interference (Ronjat, 1913), but that dominance varies with the amount of exposure to the two languages (Pavlovitch, 1920). Later studies, such as those of Leopold (1939, 1945, 1949) and Imedadze (1966, 1967), which detail the comparative growth of a child in two languages in terms of phonology, morphology, semantics, and syntax, have reported stages of development characterized by early language mixing followed by discrimination of two language systems, the latter often related to the degree of contact with monolingual interlocutors. When the language acquisition of bilinguals has been compared to that of monolinguals, there has been disagreement as to the relative rate of language acquisition. Some investigators have suggested that children in a bilingual environment develop a single set of rules in lan guage learning that, although leading to a similar developmental sequence, may result in linguistic interaction and the relatively late appearance of some structures (Swain, 1972, 1977; Major, 1976). Others have shown that Spanish or English-speaking children in bilingual environments use a dual system approach and evidence no reduction in their rate of linguistic development (Padilla & Liebman, 1975; Padilla & Lindholm, 1976). Such disagreement may be the result of the various methods used to collect speech data and to determine bilin gualism, or it may be related to the different background characteristics and experience of the This content downloaded from 157.55. 39.136 on Thu, 19 May 2016 04:56:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor. org/terms DUAL LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 21 children being compared. In addition, the small sample size in all such studies limits the degree to which their findings can be generalized. The few empirical studies on child bilingualism which go beyond the case study approach (Smith, 1957; Aikyama, 1976; Keller, 1976) generally suggest that there may be some inter ference between the two languages when bilinguals are compared with children who are mono lingual in one of the two languages examined. Carrow (1972), reporting the results of research on the English and Spanish comprehension of preschool Mexican-American children, found that younger bilingual children may be behind their monolingual counterparts in English development, but they have caught up by the final age comparison (6 years, 9 months). How ever, as Carrow pointed out in an earlier study (1971), children within similar language en vironments may differ greatly in their degree of bilingualism. The systematic investigation of such heterogeneity in dual language acquisition among Hispanic children at the same age level has not been undertaken, however. This study examines the differential degrees of bilingualism in a sample of Hispanic pre school children with similar background characteristics. Three factors related to language acquisition are investigated: the characteristics of bilingual children in general, the im portance of the dominant language of bilingual children in comparing their level of acquisi tion with that of monolinguals, and the extent to which monolingual children living in a bi lingual environment are completely monolingual. The general thesis is that it should not be assumed that children are balanced bilinguals; by making such an assumption researchers may run the danger of underestimating the level of acquisition when comparing these children with monolinguals. In addition, it is argued that bilingualism, at least among lower SES four-year-olds, must be viewed as a continuum. Characteristics of Bilinguals There seems to be no general agreement as to the criteria for judging an individual to be bilingual. One approach to a definition is based on an input-output model outlined in the work of several researchers. Weinreich (1953), Ervin and Osgood (1954), and Lambert and Rawlings (1969) have suggested distinctions based on whether a child is exposed to two lan guages simultaneously or sequentially. Weinreich (1953), in studying adults, has used the term "compound bilingual" to characterize individuals who were exposed to two languages simultaneously and "coordinate bilingual" for those who learned two languages at different times. Padilla (1977), drawing upon the work of Macnamara (1967), uses the term "balanced bilingual" to refer to a child who is equally skilled in all aspects of encoding and decoding. Padilla also uses the term "receptive bilingual" to describe a child who can understand two languages but speaks only one. The differing definitions of bilingualism are reflected in the techniques used for judging a bilingual, which often consist of little more than an interviewer attempting to carry on a one-to-one conversation in each language with a subject. As Garcia (1977) pointed out, the general lack of standardized instruments or procedures to determine bilingualism among young children is complicated by the actors, the situation, and the subtle biophysical changes that characterize development during the early years. Owing to the general lack of agreement about what is a bilingual child, we have taken the position that young children in a bilingual language environment are in the process of This content downloaded from 157.55. 39.136 on Thu, 19 May 2016 04:56:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor. org/terms 22 CHESTERFIELD AND PEREZ acquiring both a first and second language and may be able to call upon either language as appropriate to particular situations. Hence, we have used a multimethod approach to de termining language preference. For the purpose of this study, a child's preferred language is defined as the language the child uses most often with his or her parents, teachers, siblings, and peers. Such preferences were assessed by two methods. First, the parents provided a judgment of which language their child was most likely to use with different individuals in the home and in the school. Second, the children's language preference was rated through observations made in a variety of classroom activities over a two-week period at the beginning of the school year. The criterion for determining a child's language dominance was that both parents and observers described a child as using one language in a majority of situations. When a child was also described by both groups as using a second language, the child was rated bilingual. When no second language use was identified for any situation, the child was considered mono lingual. As a result of these methods, 29 children were identified as bilingual (17 Spanish preferring bilinguals and 12 English-preferring bilinguals) from a sample of 247 children en rolled in Head Start programs across the country. Comparison groups of 30 monolingual English and 30 monolingual Spanish children were randomly selected from a sample of Head Start children. The 89 children, aged 40 to 54 months, were all from Hispanic families that ranged in size from 3.4 to 6.5 persons and had a total annual income of less than $8,000.