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The Cognitive Development of Young Dual Language Learners: A Critical Review.

ABSTRACT: Dual language exposure and bilingualism are relatively common experiences for children. The present review set out to synthesize the existing research on cognitive development in bilingual children and to identify the gaps and the methodological concerns present in the existing research. A search of major data bases for research conducted with typically-developing, preschool-age dual language learners between 2000-2013 yielded 102 peer-reviewed articles. The existing evidence points to areas of cognitive development in bilingual children where findings are robust or inconclusive, and reveals variables that influence performance. The present review also identifies areas for future research and methodological limitations.

SUBMITTER: Barac R

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4180217 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The Cognitive Development of Young Dual Language Learners: A Critical Review.

Barac Raluca R Bialystok Ellen E Castro Dina C DC Sanchez Marta M

Early childhood research quarterly 20140101 4

Dual language exposure and bilingualism are relatively common experiences for children. The present review set out to synthesize the existing research on cognitive development in bilingual children and to identify the gaps and the methodological concerns present in the existing research. A search of major data bases for research conducted with typically-developing, preschool-age dual language learners between 2000-2013 yielded 102 peer-reviewed articles. The existing evidence points to areas of ...[more]

PMID: 25284958

Similar Datasets

The Language and Literacy Development of Young Dual Language Learners: A Critical Review.

Project description:The number of children living in the United States who are learning two languages is increasing greatly. However, relatively little research has been conducted on the language and literacy development of dual language learners (DLLs), particularly during the early childhood years. To summarize the extant literature and guide future research, a critical analysis of the literature was conducted. A search of major databases for studies on young typically developing DLLs between 2000-2011 yielded 182 peer-reviewed articles. Findings about DLL children's developmental trajectories in the various areas of language and literacy are presented. Much of these findings should be considered preliminary, because there were few areas where multiple studies were conducted. Conclusions were reached when sufficient evidence existed in a particular area. First, the research shows that DLLs have two separate language systems early in life. Second, differences in some areas of language development, such as vocabulary, appear to exist among DLLs depending on when they were first exposed to their second language. Third, DLLs' language and literacy development may differ from that of monolinguals, although DLLs appear to catch up over time. Fourth, little is known about factors that influence DLLs' development, although the amount of language exposure to and usage of DLLs' two languages appears to play key roles. Methodological issues are addressed, and directions for future research are discussed.

| S-EPMC4394382 | biostudies-literature

Language and Literacy Together: Supporting Grammatical Development in Dual Language Learners With Risk for Language and Learning Difficulties.

Project description:Purpose Early Interventions in Reading (Vaughn et al., 2006), the only literacy intervention with demonstrated effectiveness for U.S. dual language learners, was enhanced to support the development of oral language (vocabulary, grammar, and narrative) and literacy, which we refer to as "Language and Literacy Together." The primary focus of this study is to understand the extent to which grammatical skills of bilinguals with risk for language and/or reading difficulties improve in the Language and Literacy Together intervention. Method Fifteen first-grade dual language learners with risk for language and/or reading difficulties participated in an enhanced version of Early Interventions in Reading in Spanish. Children completed pre- and postintervention evaluations in Spanish and English, including grammatical testing from the Bilingual English Spanish Oral Screener (Peña et al., 2008) and narrative evaluation Test of Narrative Language story prompts (Gillam & Pearson, 2004; Gillam et al., n.d.). Data from six comparison participants with typical language skills who completed pre- and posttesting demonstrate the stability of the measures. Results The intervention group made gains in English and Spanish as evidenced by significant increases in their cloze and sentence repetition accuracy on the Bilingual English Spanish Oral Screener Morphosyntax subtest. They increased productivity on their narratives in Spanish and English as indexed by mean length of utterance in words but did not make gains in their overall grammaticality. Conclusions Structured intervention that includes an emphasis on grammatical elements in the context of a broader intervention can lead to change in the production of morphosyntax evident in both elicited constructions and narrative productivity as measured by mean length of utterance in words. Additional work is needed to determine if and how cross-linguistic transfer might be achieved for these learners.

| S-EPMC7225020 | biostudies-literature

A CDST Perspective on Variability in Foreign Language Learners' Listening Development.

Project description:Within a Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST) framework, this longitudinal qualitative study explored the complex patterns and identified the degree of variability in three learners' developmental process. Learners' listening performance was tracked and examined every 6 weeks, followed by retrospective interviews and self-reflections every 7 weeks over the 43-month span. A series of CDST techniques were adopted for data analysis, including using min-max graphs to trace the minimum and maximum scores on the EFL learners' listening developmental indices over time. Monte-Carlo and Loess smoothing analyses were applied to gauge for degrees of variability. The results suggest that: (1) Min-max graphs and smoothed Loess curves depict flux developmental processes of learners' L2 listening; (2) learners differed from each other in the degree of inter-individual variability in their listening developmental trajectory; and (3) occurrence of unanticipated patterns confirm that learners demonstrated personalized intra-individual variability within their unique listening developmental process. Results indicate that variability is a pattern characteristic of CDST both between and within individuals, and inform us about how Chinese EFL listeners' language develops. We conclude by discussing the implications for researchers and practitioners who are concerned with learners' developmental trajectories and unexpected changing patterns in the process of foreign language learning.

| S-EPMC7887325 | biostudies-literature

Neural language processing in adolescent first-language learners.

Project description:The relation between the timing of language input and development of neural organization for language processing in adulthood has been difficult to tease apart because language is ubiquitous in the environment of nearly all infants. However, within the congenitally deaf population are individuals who do not experience language until after early childhood. Here, we investigated the neural underpinnings of American Sign Language (ASL) in 2 adolescents who had no sustained language input until they were approximately 14 years old. Using anatomically constrained magnetoencephalography, we found that recently learned signed words mainly activated right superior parietal, anterior occipital, and dorsolateral prefrontal areas in these 2 individuals. This spatiotemporal activity pattern was significantly different from the left fronto-temporal pattern observed in young deaf adults who acquired ASL from birth, and from that of hearing young adults learning ASL as a second language for a similar length of time as the cases. These results provide direct evidence that the timing of language experience over human development affects the organization of neural language processing.

| S-EPMC4153811 | biostudies-other

Relations Among the Home Language and Literacy Environment and Children's Language Abilities: A Study of Head Start Dual Language Learners and Their Mothers.

Project description:This study explored the relations between Spanish-English dual language learner (DLL) children's home language and literacy experiences and their expressive vocabulary and oral comprehension abilities in Spanish and in English. Data from Spanish-English mothers of 93 preschool-age Head Start children who resided in central Pennsylvania were analyzed. Children completed the Picture Vocabulary and Oral Comprehension subtests of the Batería III Woodcock-Muñoz and the Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Achievement. Results revealed that the language spoken by mothers and children and the frequency of mother-child reading at home influenced children's Spanish language abilities. In addition, the frequency with which children told a story was positively related to children's performance on English oral language measures.The findings suggest that language and literacy experiences at home have a differential impact on DLLs' language abilities in their 2 languages. Specific components of the home environment that benefit and support DLL children's language abilities are discussed.

| S-EPMC4941823 | biostudies-literature

Language acquisition with communication between learners.

Project description:We consider a class of students learning a language from a teacher. The situation can be interpreted as a group of child learners receiving input from the linguistic environment. The teacher provides sample sentences. The students try to learn the grammar from the teacher. In addition to just listening to the teacher, the students can also communicate with each other. The students hold hypotheses about the grammar and change them if they receive counter evidence. The process stops when all students have converged to the correct grammar. We study how the time to convergence depends on the structure of the classroom by introducing and evaluating various complexity measures. We find that structured communication between students, although potentially introducing confusion, can greatly reduce some of the complexity measures. Our theory can also be interpreted as applying to the scientific process, where nature is the teacher and the scientists are the students.

| S-EPMC5908541 | biostudies-literature

Cognitive Representation of Spontaneous Motion in a Second Language: An Exploration of Chinese Learners of English.

Project description:This study tests whether Chinese learners of English can reconstruct their cognitive pattern in the direction of the target system when judging the similarity between spontaneous motion screens in a match-to-sample task. English main verbs encode Manner of motion only, while Chinese verb compounds express Manner and Path simultaneously. Chinese monolinguals are thus predicted to develop a motion cognition pattern highlighting both Manner and Path salience whereas English monolinguals are more likely to be Manner-oriented. Our research findings are twofold. First, when assessed by the explicit measure of selection strategies (i.e., either Manner-match or Path-match), both monolingual and L2 learners show a general preference for the Path-match. However, when gauged by the implicit measure of processing speed (i.e., reaction time), Chinese monolinguals reacted significantly quicker than their English counterparts, particularly in making Path-matched judgments. Further, the L2 English learners across proficiencies responded significantly more slowly than their monolingual counterparts even at an advanced stage of acquisition, suggesting that the process of conceptual reconstructing, as demonstrated in our experiment, can be cognitively demanding and needs a longer period of time to complete. These findings are generally consistent with a weak version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis.

| S-EPMC6902645 | biostudies-literature

The Cultural and Diagnostic Appropriateness of Standardized Assessments for Dual Language Learners: A Focus on Jamaican Preschoolers.

Project description:Purpose The aim of this study was to investigate the appropriateness of standardized assessments of expressive grammar and vocabulary in a sample of preschool-age dual language learners (DLLs) who use Jamaican Creole (JC) and English. Adult models from the same linguistic community as these children were used to inform culturally and linguistically appropriate interpretation of children's responses to a standardized assessment. Method JC-English-speaking preschoolers (n = 176) and adults (n = 33) completed the Word Structure and Expressive Vocabulary subtests of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool-Second Edition. Adults' responses were used to develop an adapted scoring procedure that considered the influence of JC linguistic features on responses. DLLs' responses scored using the standard English and adapted JC procedures were compared. Results JC-English DLLs and adults used similar linguistic structures in response to subtest questions. DLLs' scores differed significantly from the standardized sample on both subtests. Preschoolers received higher raw and corresponding standard scores with adapted scoring compared to standard scoring. Adapted scoring that made use of adult models yielded high classification accuracy at a rate of 93.8% for Word Structure and 92.1% for Expressive Vocabulary. Conclusions Adapting standardized assessment scoring procedures using adult models may offer an ecologically valid approach to working with DLL preschoolers that can support a more accurate assessment of language functioning. These findings suggest that the use of standardized assessments for bilingual JC-English speakers requires a culturally responsive approach. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.14403026.

| S-EPMC8711714 | biostudies-literature

Neural Language Processing in Adolescent First-Language Learners: Longitudinal Case Studies in American Sign Language.

Project description:One key question in neurolinguistics is the extent to which the neural processing system for language requires linguistic experience during early life to develop fully. We conducted a longitudinal anatomically constrained magnetoencephalography (aMEG) analysis of lexico-semantic processing in 2 deaf adolescents who had no sustained language input until 14 years of age, when they became fully immersed in American Sign Language. After 2 to 3 years of language, the adolescents' neural responses to signed words were highly atypical, localizing mainly to right dorsal frontoparietal regions and often responding more strongly to semantically primed words (Ferjan Ramirez N, Leonard MK, Torres C, Hatrak M, Halgren E, Mayberry RI. 2014. Neural language processing in adolescent first-language learners. Cereb Cortex. 24 (10): 2772-2783). Here, we show that after an additional 15 months of language experience, the adolescents' neural responses remained atypical in terms of polarity. While their responses to less familiar signed words still showed atypical localization patterns, the localization of responses to highly familiar signed words became more concentrated in the left perisylvian language network. Our findings suggest that the timing of language experience affects the organization of neural language processing; however, even in adolescence, language representation in the human brain continues to evolve with experience.

| S-EPMC4737603 | biostudies-literature

Language learners privilege structured meaning over surface frequency.

Project description:Although it is widely agreed that learning the syntax of natural languages involves acquiring structure-dependent rules, recent work on acquisition has nevertheless attempted to characterize the outcome of learning primarily in terms of statistical generalizations about surface distributional information. In this paper we investigate whether surface statistical knowledge or structural knowledge of English is used to infer properties of a novel language under conditions of impoverished input. We expose learners to artificial-language patterns that are equally consistent with two possible underlying grammars--one more similar to English in terms of the linear ordering of words, the other more similar on abstract structural grounds. We show that learners' grammatical inferences overwhelmingly favor structural similarity over preservation of superficial order. Importantly, the relevant shared structure can be characterized in terms of a universal preference for isomorphism in the mapping from meanings to utterances. Whereas previous empirical support for this universal has been based entirely on data from cross-linguistic language samples, our results suggest it may reflect a deep property of the human cognitive system--a property that, together with other structure-sensitive principles, constrains the acquisition of linguistic knowledge.

| S-EPMC4000832 | biostudies-literature

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