The Dynamics of Early Bilingual Experience

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This research project provides new insights into how young bilinguals learn two languages by examining how bilingual parents helps their infants understand and say words in two languages. Most studies of early language development have examined children’s learning in only one language, but millions of children in the U.S. grow up learning two or more languages. This means that the fields of developmental science, linguistics, early education, speech-language pathology, and medicine have an inaccurate view of how children learn to communicate. This research project produces a richer and more inclusive understanding of early learning in language by examining how bilingual and monolingual parents play with their infants. The project investigates how features of parent-child play relate to children’s growing understanding of language. The findings from this project provide important information that may help parents, teachers, speech-language therapists, and doctors support the development of young bilinguals. To investigate how parents support language development, project staff travels to families’ homes to record parents while they play with their infants. The project also collects measures of parents’ and infant’s language understanding and how they use different patterns that they hear in the language. The project focuses on Mexican heritage families, monolingual and bilingual, because many American bilinguals have Mexican heritage and speak Spanish in addition to English. The project analyzes links between parents’ language, their gestures and actions, and how they follow and guide their infants’ attention. We also analyzes how infants respond to and guide parents’ behaviors, and how these may influence the emerging vocabulary knowledge of infants. This research reveals dimensions of parent-infant interactions that occur across monolingual and bilingual Mexican heritage families and also features that are specific to bilinguals.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.