Résultats de recherche

1. Objectifs

Intentions :
The goal of this study «was to understand the nature of code-switching in parental speech to bilingual infants, focusing on a) frequency, b) syntactic location, and c) apparent reasons for code-switching.» (p. 2)

Questions/Hypothèses :
First, the authors «expected to observe code-switching in all families. However, [they] expected that the frequency of code-switching would vary across families.» (p. 6) In addition, «[they] predicted that parents would code-switch both between and within sentences.» (p. 6) The authors also «anticipated that code-switching would occur for a variety of apparent reasons.» (p. 6) Finally, [the authors] expected parents’ code-switching frequency to increase between these two time points, as they adjust to their children’s language skills.» (p. 6-7)

2. Méthode

Échantillon/Matériau :
«Participants who contributed to the corpus were families with a young infant who heard French and English at home (n=21). Infants were 10 months of age […] during their first visit to the laboratory. Most of these families returned for a second visit (n = 16) when infants were 18 months of age […]. As reported by parents, none of the infants had an auditory or developmental neurocognitive disorder.» (p. 7)

Instruments :
Questionnaire

Type de traitement des données :
Analyse statistique

3. Résumé

«First, we found that the frequency of code-switching, whether controlling for hours of infant-directed speech or number of infant-directed words, generally increased between 10 and 18 months of age. Second, we found that the majority of parents’ code-switches occurred intersententially at both ages, and that this proportion increased across their infant’s development. For the code-switches that occurred intrasententially, the proportions of code-switches that happened between syntactic phrases and within a syntactic phrase were comparable at both ages. Last, while parents code-switched for a variety of apparent reasons, most parental code-switches at both time points appeared to be motivated by the desire to bolster their infant’s understanding. Parents also appeared to code-switch more to teach vocabulary when their infant was 18-months old than when they were 10-months old. Combined, our results suggest that parents may be adapting their code-switching behavior to their infant’s developing linguistic abilities, producing code-switching that could support successful acquisition of both languages.» (p. 18)

1. Objectifs

Intentions :
«In this manuscript-based dissertation, we explored how bilingual caregivers talk to their infants, and how this might affect their infants’ language acquisition patterns. Specifically, we characterized what the bilingual experience might look like in a select group of bilingual families, and investigated how the global measures of the bilingual input are related to infants’ early speech processing skills. To this end, we collected recordings of French-English bilingual caregivers talking to their 10-month-old infants at home (Chapters 2 and 3), and assessed infants’ word segmentation abilities (Chapter 4).» (p. 22) Only, the third chapter will be summarized in Famili@. More specifically, the «overarching goal of this [chapter] is to investigate the nature of dual language input to bilingual infants, and to address some of the methodological concerns about parent reports in research on bilingual development.» (p. 55)

2. Méthode

Échantillon/Matériau :
«Twenty-one [French-English bilingual] families with a 10-month-old infant (13 boys, 8 girls; age range = 289– 319 days, M = 303 days) took part in this study.» (p. 62) They were «recruited our participants from a database of infants who were born in Montréal, Québec. […] All families consisted of one father (age range = 27-36 years, M = 36) and one mother (age range = 30-41 years, M = 35). Eight of the infants were first single-born children, ten had one older sibling, and two had two older siblings (sibling age range = 2- 8 years; M = 4).» (p. 63)

Instruments :
Questionnaire

Type de traitement des données :
Analyse statistique

3. Résumé

«Our findings confirm that monolingual infants can segment bisyllabic words in their native language, but not a non-native language.» (p. iv) For the third chapter, «our study reveals that language interviews can elicit reliable quantitative information about a bilingual infant’s language environment. Specifically, parent-report measures of their child’s exposure to each language correspond closely to language proportions observed in naturalistic daylong recordings at home. […] Our approach was to conduct a language interview both before and after the recordings were made […], and we showed that both types of parent-report measures were tightly coupled with infants’ actual language experiences. By showing this relationship in both directions, we can deduce that [t]he recordings conducted at home are representative of a child’s typical day, and that [p]arents can accurately recall the language proportion of days that have passed.» (p. 79) «Our findings also show that parents are quite reliable at describing their own language use to their infants. While all bilingual parents used both languages when speaking to their infant even minimally, those who reported speaking one language used their dominant language proportionally more than those who reported speaking both languages. Further, the families who explicitly reported using the “one-parent, one language” strategy generally showed this pattern during the recordings, although in our sample all parents used both languages at least to a minimal degree.» (p. 80)