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FACTORS AFFECTING LANGUAGE OUTCOMES OF YOUNG CHILDREN IN BILINGUAL ENVIRONMENTS
Judith Cruzado-Guerrero and Judith Carta
University of Kansas
A range of factors influence the language outcomes of Latino children growing up in bilingual households in inner-city communities. These factors include environmental risk factors, family cultural expectations about language use, and amount of exposure to language inside and outside the home. This report focuses on these factors in a subsample of 20 children from bilingual English/Spanish environments in an urban community who were involved in the larger Early Head Start national study.
Methods
Participants
Twenty children from the larger Early Head Start study were selected who met the following criteria established during Early Head Start enrollment: (1) they identified their ethnicity as Mexican, and (2) they included Spanish and/or English as their home languages. In a follow-up interview, families meeting these criteria reported that their child was being raised in a bilingual environment and characterized that environment as English- or Spanish-dominant based on the language most commonly used by the child in the home. Using these criteria, 11 families identified themselves as Spanish-dominant and 9 as English-dominant. Ten of the families were participants in the Early Head Start program (six were Spanish-Dominant; four were English-dominant).
Design and Measures
This study followed the same prospective longitudinal design used in the larger Early Head Start evaluation and followed children from approximately 8 to 36 months. Two of the measures used to assess the families and children were from the larger Early Head Start study: (1) the Head Start Family Information System (HSFIS) to identify demographic risk factors, and (2) the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) and its Spanish adaptation (Inventario del Desarrollo de las Habilidades Comunicativas). Supplementing these measures were the Acculturation Rating Scale for Mexican Americans-II (ARSMA-II); a project-developed Language Background Questionnaire (to provide the extent of the child's exposure in English and Spanish by various caregivers inside and outside of the home); and the CIRCLE Observation System, a momentary time-sampling system that recorded the percentage of time children interacted in English and Spanish with primary caregivers during typical home activities (Atwater et al. 1993).
Results
Characteristics of English- and Spanish-Dominant Families
Spanish-dominant families were more likely to have a greater number of environmental risks (M = 4.9 out of a possible 6 factors) than the English-dominant families (M = 4.0). Specifically, Spanish-dominant families were more likely to be larger (family size is > 5) and have a mother who did not finish high school and who did not speak English. English-dominant families, on the other hand, were more likely to be headed by single parents as opposed to two parents residing in the home.
Spanish-dominant families were less acculturated into the mainstream culture. On the ARSMA-II scale, families in the sample were rated using established cutpoints for determining acculturation levels from Level 1-Very Mexican (scores < -1.55) to Level 3-Slightly Anglo-oriented (scores between -.07 and 1.19). Not surprisingly, the mean acculturation score for Spanish-dominant families (-1.55) indicated an orientation that was significantly more Mexican than that of the English-dominant families (M = .15) (df = 9, p < .01).
Degree of Exposure to Spanish and English
While both groups were exposed to both English and Spanish, children in Spanish-dominant families were exposed to much higher proportions of Spanish (85 percent) than were the children in the English-dominant families, whose relative exposure to Spanish was only 32 percent. It is important to realize that characterizing children's language environment as English- or Spanish-dominant greatly oversimplifies the complexity of their linguistic exposure. Children may have been surrounded by a variety of caregivers both in their homes and outside their home (in childcare arrangements) who spoke English, Spanish, or a combination. Therefore, in this study, estimates of percentage of exposure were made by determining the caregivers (both primary and secondary) for a specific child and the amounts of time each caregiver spoke Spanish or English. Times reported for primary caregivers were weighted more heavily than those reported for secondary caregivers.
Language Outcomes in Spanish and English
Language outcomes of a subsample of 16 children were assessed in both Spanish and English on different measures at several age points. At 30 months, children in the Spanish-dominant group were producing fewer vocabulary words in both languages on the CDI (M = 392.43) than were children in the English-dominant group (M = 478.71). As expected, however, the Spanish-dominant children were producing more vocabulary words in Spanish (M = 318.67) than the English-dominant children (M = 210.43). English-dominant children were reported to produce more vocabulary words in English (M = 272.29) than the Spanish-dominant children (M = 103. 51). Spanish-dominant children had higher vocabulary scores in their dominant language than did the English-dominant children, but English-dominant children outperformed the Spanish-dominant children in their nondominant language. Children's CDI vocabulary scores in their dominant language were highly correlated to the relative amount of exposure in that language (for English-dominant: r = .68, p < .01; for Spanish-dominant: r = .67; p < .01). Finally, on the direct observation measure, parents in English-dominant group spent more time verbalizing to their children than did the Spanish-dominant group. Families who were more highly acculturated and who had fewer risks also spent more time verbalizing to their children in either language. Similarly, English-dominant children spent more time verbalizing than did the Spanish-dominant children. The English-dominant group spent 9.8 percent of their time talking in English and 4.2 percent of the observation talking in Spanish. Spanish-dominant children were observed spending 4.1 percent of their time in Spanish and 1.2 percent of their time speaking English.
Conclusions
Consistent with other research (Hart and Risley 1995), this study supports the notion that children's language outcomes are highly related to the amount of language exposure. Children with greater levels of exposure in specific languages were likely to have higher vocabulary scores in that language. While children from English-dominant bilingual environments are experiencing better language outcomes in their secondary language, they also appeared to have an edge in the amount of parent interaction in both languages. Their families also appeared to have lower levels of environmental risk.
References
Atwater, J., D. Montagna, M. Creighton, R. Williams, and S. Hou. CIRCLE-II: Code for Interactive Recording of Caregiving and Learning Environments - Infancy Through Early Childhood. Kansas City, Kansas: Early Childhood Research Institute on Substance Abuse, Juniper Gardens Children's Project, 1993.
Hart, B., and T. Risley, Meaningful differences in
the everyday experience of young American children. Paul H. Brookes, 1995.
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