Papers by Tamara Sorenson Duncan
Reading and Writing
This study evaluates the extent to which syntactic awareness contributes to reading comprehension... more This study evaluates the extent to which syntactic awareness contributes to reading comprehension in English–French bilinguals, considering both the potential for a direct relation, as well as an indirect one, through word reading. Participants were 146 first-grade students enrolled in early French immersion programs in Canada. While the children received all school instruction in French, English was their stronger language and the language of the broader community. Given this dual language context, we examined relations from syntactic awareness in each of English and French to children’s French reading comprehension. Path analyses showed that within French, the language of school instruction, syntactic awareness contributed to reading comprehension indirectly through word reading. The findings suggest that novice readers rely more heavily on basic reading skills, such as word reading, to comprehend texts and syntactic awareness facilitates reading comprehension through word reading. Across the two languages, English syntactic awareness contributed both directly to French reading comprehension and indirectly through French word reading. The cross-language findings suggest that English syntactic awareness is related to French to support French reading comprehension. These findings help fill in a developmental picture in early bilinguals, particularly given studies of older, more skilled monolingual readers showing evidence for solely a direct relation between syntactic awareness and reading comprehension.
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Reading and Writing
This study evaluates the extent to which syntactic awareness contributes to reading comprehension... more This study evaluates the extent to which syntactic awareness contributes to reading comprehension in English–French bilinguals, considering both the potential for a direct relation, as well as an indirect one, through word reading. Participants were 146 first-grade students enrolled in early French immersion programs in Canada. While the children received all school instruction in French, English was their stronger language and the language of the broader community. Given this dual language context, we examined relations from syntactic awareness in each of English and French to children’s French reading comprehension. Path analyses showed that within French, the language of school instruction, syntactic awareness contributed to reading comprehension indirectly through word reading. The findings suggest that novice readers rely more heavily on basic reading skills, such as word reading, to comprehend texts and syntactic awareness facilitates reading comprehension through word reading. Across the two languages, English syntactic awareness contributed both directly to French reading comprehension and indirectly through French word reading. The cross-language findings suggest that English syntactic awareness is related to French to support French reading comprehension. These findings help fill in a developmental picture in early bilinguals, particularly given studies of older, more skilled monolingual readers showing evidence for solely a direct relation between syntactic awareness and reading comprehension.
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Autism Research, 2021
The ability to understand what one reads, or reading comprehension, is central to academic succes... more The ability to understand what one reads, or reading comprehension, is central to academic success. For many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), reading comprehension is a noted area of challenge. For children with typical development, it is well established that successful reading comprehension requires two broad skills: word reading and oral language. For children with ASD, word reading is often believed to be relatively intact, even in the face of poor reading comprehension, suggesting that deficits in oral language, more than in word reading, underlie reading comprehension deficits. Yet, extant research has suggested the importance of both skills. To clarify the role of these skills in the reading comprehension of children with ASD, we conducted a meta‐analysis. ERIC, PsycINFO, PubMed, and Proquest Dissertation & Theses were searched for studies of reading comprehension in children with ASD, published up to May 2019. We identified 26 relevant studies about children with ASD (aged 6–18 years) that included both a measure of word reading and reading comprehension. Hunt‐Schmidt Random Effects Models showed similar mean correlations between reading comprehension and the component skills of word reading (M r = 0.65 [0.27–1.03]) and oral language (M r = 0.61 [0.33–0.88]). These findings demonstrate that these skills are essential for reading comprehension in children with ASD, making contributions of similar size. This study advances our understanding of the mechanisms by which children with ASD understand what they read, providing a foundation on which to build programmatic research into each of these mechanisms.
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Autism Research, 2021
The ability to understand what one reads, or reading comprehension, is central to academic succes... more The ability to understand what one reads, or reading comprehension, is central to academic success. For many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), reading comprehension is a noted area of challenge. For children with typical development, it is well established that successful reading comprehension requires two broad skills: word reading and oral language. For children with ASD, word reading is often believed to be relatively intact, even in the face of poor reading comprehension, suggesting that deficits in oral language, more than in word reading, underlie reading comprehension deficits. Yet, extant research has suggested the importance of both skills. To clarify the role of these skills in the reading comprehension of children with ASD, we conducted a meta‐analysis. ERIC, PsycINFO, PubMed, and Proquest Dissertation & Theses were searched for studies of reading comprehension in children with ASD, published up to May 2019. We identified 26 relevant studies about children with ASD (aged 6–18 years) that included both a measure of word reading and reading comprehension. Hunt‐Schmidt Random Effects Models showed similar mean correlations between reading comprehension and the component skills of word reading (M r = 0.65 [0.27–1.03]) and oral language (M r = 0.61 [0.33–0.88]). These findings demonstrate that these skills are essential for reading comprehension in children with ASD, making contributions of similar size. This study advances our understanding of the mechanisms by which children with ASD understand what they read, providing a foundation on which to build programmatic research into each of these mechanisms.
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Research examining monolingual children’s acquisition demonstrates that children’s language devel... more Research examining monolingual children’s acquisition demonstrates that children’s language development is intricately connected to the linguistic input they receive. However, their input varies on an individual basis; input is shaped by the broader social context in which they live (environment). Thus far, few studies have empirically investigated interdependencies between environment and linguistic input for bilingual children. To address this knowledge gap, this study uses a social interactionist approach to explicitly examine the relationship between the linguistic input child second language (L2) learners receive and their mothers’ level of education. It is generally assumed that higher levels of maternal education will be associated with increased language abilities in children because mothers with higher levels of education provide their children with more linguistic input. This assumption, however, is based largely on studies about monolingual children. Existing research sug...
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Abstract of presentation for ALS2016
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Journal of Child Language, 2020
Previous research suggests that increased second language (L2) input at home may not support L2 a... more Previous research suggests that increased second language (L2) input at home may not support L2 acquisition in children from migrant backgrounds. In drawing this conclusion, existing work has largely aggregated across family members. This study contrasts the effect of L2 input from older siblings with that from mothers. Participants were 113 child L2 learners of English (mean age = 5;10 [range 4;10–7;2]; mean exposure to L2 in school = 16.7 months [range 2–48 months]). All children had at least one older sibling. Using hierarchical linear regression modelling with controls for age, non-verbal reasoning and phonological short-term memory, we found that greater L2 input from siblings – but not mothers – was associated with stronger L2 abilities in narrative macrostructure, inflectional morphology, and vocabulary. Increased cumulative exposure to the L2 at school and greater maternal L2 fluency were also positively related to children's L2 inflectional morphology and vocabulary sco...
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Language Learning, 2012
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Over-identification of language disorder among bilingual children with typical development (TD) i... more Over-identification of language disorder among bilingual children with typical development (TD) is a risk factor in assessment. One strategy for improving assessment accuracy with bilingual children is to determine which linguistic sub-domains differentiate bilingual children with TD from bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD). To date, little research on sequential bilinguals with TD and DLD has focussed on complex (multi-clausal) sentences in naturalistic production, even though this is a noted domain of weakness for school-age monolinguals with DLD. Accordingly, we sought to determine if there were differences in the use of complex sentences in conversational and narrative tasks between school-age sequential bilinguals with TD and with DLD at the early stages of L2 acquisition. We administered a conversation and a narrative task to 63 English L2 children with TD and DLD, aged 5–7 years with 2 years of exposure to the L2. Children had diverse first language ...
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Annee Psychologique, 2018
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The use of different research methods in linguistics invariably leads to questions about the conv... more The use of different research methods in linguistics invariably leads to questions about the convergence and divergence of research findings. Aiming for convergence, while understandable, may distort our understanding of language phenomena, if convergence is seen as the only publishable result. We suggest a place for diverging results in furthering our understanding of the data techniques used to investigate linguistic phenomena. We illustrate this point through an experimental and corpus-based investigation of the preferred syntactic subjects of the English verb ROAR and discuss how deeper reflection on these diverging results leads to a better understanding of the different data types.
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Television is frequently suggested to be a valuable language “teacher” for children who are learn... more Television is frequently suggested to be a valuable language “teacher” for children who are learning a second language (L2), especially when parents have limited L2 fluency. In this context, parents may not be providing their children with sufficiently rich input to support L2 development. In fact, a growing body of evidence suggests that increased L2 input at home has negligible influence on the emerging L2 abilities of children from immigrant and refugee backgrounds (e.g., Chondrogianni & Marinis, 2011; Golberg, Paradis, & Crago, 2008; Paradis, 2011). Accordingly, television may provide an opportunity to increase the amount of native-speaker input children receive (e.g., Lindgren & Muñoz, 2013; Paradis & R. Jia, 2017). Advice to consider television as a valuable source of language input, however, may seem surprising given that high quantities of television viewing have been associated with depressed expressive language scores and even language delays in monolingual children (e.g.,...
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Reading Research Quarterly, 2021
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Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education
This study investigated access to and outcomes of Early French Immersion (EFI) for students with ... more This study investigated access to and outcomes of Early French Immersion (EFI) for students with special education needs (SEN) attending a large school board in Canada. Data analysis was carried out on: provincially mandated achievement test scores for all Grade 3 students with SEN participating over a three-year period (n = 705) who attended either EFI or English programs; standardized French and English language and reading scores for a small subset of students (n = 20); and interviews with parents of Grade 4 students in EFI (n = 9). Results revealed lower participation but higher English academic and language performance for students with SEN in the EFI program as well as development of French language and reading skills. Interviewed parents often believed children with SEN ‘could not handle’ EFI and that withdrawal should be an option in response to learning difficulties. Implications for inclusive practices in EFI are discussed.
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Journal of Educational Psychology
Sorenson Duncan, T., Mimeau, C., Crowell, N. & Deacon , S. H. Not all sentences are creat... more Sorenson Duncan, T., Mimeau, C., Crowell, N. & Deacon , S. H. Not all sentences are created equal: Evaluating the relation between children’s understanding of basic and difficult sentences and their reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/edu0000545. The sentences in texts are far more complex and diverse than those that children commonly encounter in oral language. This raises interesting questions as to whether the understanding of some sentence types might be more important than others in children’s reading comprehension. Accordingly, we examined the relation between children’s reading comprehension and their understanding of two types of sentences: one we label as basic sentences, which are common in both oral and written language, and the other we label as difficult sentences, which are more restricted to written language. One hundred and four English-speaking students (mean age = 10.8 years) completed an experimental measure of oral sentence comprehension capturing these two sentence types, a standardized measure of reading comprehension, as well as control measures for word reading, phonological awareness, vocabulary and working memory. After accounting for the variance explained by the control measures, hierarchical linear regression analyses revealed that comprehension of basic sentences, but not of difficult sentences, was significantly related to children’s reading comprehension. These results demonstrate that, at least in the 5th grade, English-speaking children use their understanding of those sentences for which they have gained a strong foundation through oral language (i.e. basic sentences) to springboard into reading for understanding. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)
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International Journal of Bilingualism
Aims: In monolingual situations, mothers with higher levels of education are more likely to provi... more Aims: In monolingual situations, mothers with higher levels of education are more likely to provide their children with enriched linguistic input. However, in bilingual situations, the relationship between maternal education and input is more complex because education may have occurred in one, but not both, of the languages. This study details this complexity by examining the relationship between maternal education and linguistic input in a group of children learning English as a second language (L2). Method: Participants were 89 immigrant/refugee children, living in Canada with diverse first languages (L1s). They completed a story-telling task in their L2 and parent reports provided a measure of L1 development. Parents also answered detailed questionnaires about family demographics and linguistic input within the family. Results: Regression modeling revealed that cumulative exposure to the L2 in school, maternal L2 fluency, relative quantity of L1/L2 use by the mother (input) and b...
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Annual Review of Applied Linguistics
The goal of this study was to determine (a) the similarities and dissimilarities between child L2... more The goal of this study was to determine (a) the similarities and dissimilarities between child L2 and L1 acquisition of complex sentences and (b) the individual difference factors predicting L2 children's acquisition of complex sentences. We analyzed language samples from 187 English L2 children with diverse L1s (Agemean = 5;10 [years;months]; English exposuremean = 17 months). Children used various types of complex sentences at all levels of L2 exposure, including sentences with relative clauses, which are late-acquired by L1 learners. Mixed logistic regression modeling revealed that longer exposure to English in school, richer English environments outside school, larger L2 vocabulary, superior verbal memory and visual analytic reasoning contributed to greater use of complex sentences. L1 typology did not impact complex sentence use in the L2. Overall, L2 children used more complex sentences within a few months of English L2 exposure than what is reported for L1 children aged 2...
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Autism Research, 2021
Sorenson Duncan, T., Karkada, M., Deacon, S.H. & Smith, I.M. (2021). Building Meaning: Meta-analy... more Sorenson Duncan, T., Karkada, M., Deacon, S.H. & Smith, I.M. (2021). Building Meaning: Meta-analysis of Component Skills Supporting Reading Comprehension in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Autism Research. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/aur.2483
The ability to understand what one reads, or reading comprehension, is central to academic success. For many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), reading comprehension is a noted area of challenge. For children with typical development, it is well established that successful reading comprehension requires two broad skills: word reading and oral language. For children with ASD, word reading is often believed to be relatively intact, even in the face of poor reading comprehension, suggesting that deficits in oral language, more than in word reading, underlie reading comprehension deficits. Yet, extant research has suggested the importance of both skills. To clarify the role of these skills in the reading comprehension of children with ASD, we conducted a meta‐analysis. ERIC, PsycINFO, PubMed, and Proquest Dissertation & Theses were searched for studies of reading comprehension in children with ASD, published up to May 2019. We identified 26 relevant studies about children with ASD (aged 6–18 years) that included both a measure of word reading and reading comprehension. Hunt‐Schmidt Random Effects Models showed similar mean correlations between reading comprehension and the component skills of word reading (M r = 0.65 [0.27–1.03]) and oral language (M r = 0.61 [0.33–0.88]). These findings demonstrate that these skills are essential for reading comprehension in children with ASD, making contributions of similar size. This study advances our understanding of the mechanisms by which children with ASD understand what they read, providing a foundation on which to build programmatic research into each of these mechanisms.
Lay Summary
Academic progress is closely tied to children's ability to understand what they read. Yet reading comprehension is difficult for many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We used a statistical method to summarize existing research on the skills that children with ASD use to understand what they read. We found that the reading comprehension of children with ASD was related to a similar extent to both their ability to read individual words and their oral language skills. These findings suggest that both areas should be assessed in order to determine appropriate interventions to support reading comprehension for children with ASD.
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Journal of Educational Psychology, 2020
Sorenson Duncan, T., Mimeau, C., Crowell, N. & Deacon , S. H. Not all sentences are created equal... more Sorenson Duncan, T., Mimeau, C., Crowell, N. & Deacon , S. H. Not all sentences are created equal: Evaluating the relation between children’s understanding of basic and difficult sentences and their reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/edu0000545.
The sentences in texts are far more complex and diverse than those that children commonly encounter in oral language. This raises interesting questions as to whether the understanding of some sentence types might be more important than others in children’s reading comprehension. Accordingly, we examined the relation between children’s reading comprehension and their understanding of two types of sentences: one we label as basic sentences, which are common in both oral and written language, and the other we label as difficult sentences, which are more restricted to written language. One hundred and four English-speaking students (mean age = 10.8 years) completed an experimental measure of oral sentence comprehension capturing these two sentence types, a standardized measure of reading comprehension, as well as control measures for word reading, phonological awareness, vocabulary and working memory. After accounting for the variance explained by the control measures, hierarchical linear regression analyses revealed that comprehension of basic sentences, but not of difficult sentences, was significantly related to children’s reading comprehension. These results demonstrate that, at least in the 5th grade, English-speaking children use their understanding of those sentences for which they have gained a strong foundation through oral language (i.e. basic sentences) to springboard into reading for understanding. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)
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Journal of Child Language, 2020
Previous research suggests that increased second language (L2) input at home may not support L2 a... more Previous research suggests that increased second language (L2) input at home may not support L2 acquisition in children from migrant backgrounds. In drawing this conclusion, existing work has largely aggregated across family members. This study contrasts the effect of L2 input from older siblings with that from mothers. Participants were 113 child L2 learners of English (mean age = 5;10 [range 4;10–7;2]; mean exposure to L2 in school = 16.7 months [range 2–48 months]). All children had at least one older sibling. Using hierarchical linear regression modelling with controls for age, non-verbal reasoning and phonological short-term memory, we found that greater L2 input from siblings – but not mothers – was associated with stronger L2 abilities in narrative macrostructure, inflectional morphology, and vocabulary. Increased cumulative exposure to the L2 at school and greater maternal L2 fluency were also positively related to children’s L2 inflectional morphology and vocabulary scores.
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Papers by Tamara Sorenson Duncan
The ability to understand what one reads, or reading comprehension, is central to academic success. For many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), reading comprehension is a noted area of challenge. For children with typical development, it is well established that successful reading comprehension requires two broad skills: word reading and oral language. For children with ASD, word reading is often believed to be relatively intact, even in the face of poor reading comprehension, suggesting that deficits in oral language, more than in word reading, underlie reading comprehension deficits. Yet, extant research has suggested the importance of both skills. To clarify the role of these skills in the reading comprehension of children with ASD, we conducted a meta‐analysis. ERIC, PsycINFO, PubMed, and Proquest Dissertation & Theses were searched for studies of reading comprehension in children with ASD, published up to May 2019. We identified 26 relevant studies about children with ASD (aged 6–18 years) that included both a measure of word reading and reading comprehension. Hunt‐Schmidt Random Effects Models showed similar mean correlations between reading comprehension and the component skills of word reading (M r = 0.65 [0.27–1.03]) and oral language (M r = 0.61 [0.33–0.88]). These findings demonstrate that these skills are essential for reading comprehension in children with ASD, making contributions of similar size. This study advances our understanding of the mechanisms by which children with ASD understand what they read, providing a foundation on which to build programmatic research into each of these mechanisms.
Lay Summary
Academic progress is closely tied to children's ability to understand what they read. Yet reading comprehension is difficult for many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We used a statistical method to summarize existing research on the skills that children with ASD use to understand what they read. We found that the reading comprehension of children with ASD was related to a similar extent to both their ability to read individual words and their oral language skills. These findings suggest that both areas should be assessed in order to determine appropriate interventions to support reading comprehension for children with ASD.
The sentences in texts are far more complex and diverse than those that children commonly encounter in oral language. This raises interesting questions as to whether the understanding of some sentence types might be more important than others in children’s reading comprehension. Accordingly, we examined the relation between children’s reading comprehension and their understanding of two types of sentences: one we label as basic sentences, which are common in both oral and written language, and the other we label as difficult sentences, which are more restricted to written language. One hundred and four English-speaking students (mean age = 10.8 years) completed an experimental measure of oral sentence comprehension capturing these two sentence types, a standardized measure of reading comprehension, as well as control measures for word reading, phonological awareness, vocabulary and working memory. After accounting for the variance explained by the control measures, hierarchical linear regression analyses revealed that comprehension of basic sentences, but not of difficult sentences, was significantly related to children’s reading comprehension. These results demonstrate that, at least in the 5th grade, English-speaking children use their understanding of those sentences for which they have gained a strong foundation through oral language (i.e. basic sentences) to springboard into reading for understanding. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)
The ability to understand what one reads, or reading comprehension, is central to academic success. For many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), reading comprehension is a noted area of challenge. For children with typical development, it is well established that successful reading comprehension requires two broad skills: word reading and oral language. For children with ASD, word reading is often believed to be relatively intact, even in the face of poor reading comprehension, suggesting that deficits in oral language, more than in word reading, underlie reading comprehension deficits. Yet, extant research has suggested the importance of both skills. To clarify the role of these skills in the reading comprehension of children with ASD, we conducted a meta‐analysis. ERIC, PsycINFO, PubMed, and Proquest Dissertation & Theses were searched for studies of reading comprehension in children with ASD, published up to May 2019. We identified 26 relevant studies about children with ASD (aged 6–18 years) that included both a measure of word reading and reading comprehension. Hunt‐Schmidt Random Effects Models showed similar mean correlations between reading comprehension and the component skills of word reading (M r = 0.65 [0.27–1.03]) and oral language (M r = 0.61 [0.33–0.88]). These findings demonstrate that these skills are essential for reading comprehension in children with ASD, making contributions of similar size. This study advances our understanding of the mechanisms by which children with ASD understand what they read, providing a foundation on which to build programmatic research into each of these mechanisms.
Lay Summary
Academic progress is closely tied to children's ability to understand what they read. Yet reading comprehension is difficult for many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We used a statistical method to summarize existing research on the skills that children with ASD use to understand what they read. We found that the reading comprehension of children with ASD was related to a similar extent to both their ability to read individual words and their oral language skills. These findings suggest that both areas should be assessed in order to determine appropriate interventions to support reading comprehension for children with ASD.
The sentences in texts are far more complex and diverse than those that children commonly encounter in oral language. This raises interesting questions as to whether the understanding of some sentence types might be more important than others in children’s reading comprehension. Accordingly, we examined the relation between children’s reading comprehension and their understanding of two types of sentences: one we label as basic sentences, which are common in both oral and written language, and the other we label as difficult sentences, which are more restricted to written language. One hundred and four English-speaking students (mean age = 10.8 years) completed an experimental measure of oral sentence comprehension capturing these two sentence types, a standardized measure of reading comprehension, as well as control measures for word reading, phonological awareness, vocabulary and working memory. After accounting for the variance explained by the control measures, hierarchical linear regression analyses revealed that comprehension of basic sentences, but not of difficult sentences, was significantly related to children’s reading comprehension. These results demonstrate that, at least in the 5th grade, English-speaking children use their understanding of those sentences for which they have gained a strong foundation through oral language (i.e. basic sentences) to springboard into reading for understanding. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)
There is a clear preference for seeking and reporting on convergence of rather than divergence in the relevant literature, as exemplified in Brdar, Gries, and Fuchs (2011), Gries, Hampe, and Schönefeld (2005a), Gries, Hampe, and Schönefeld (2005b), Schönefeld (2011), Wulff (2009), and Wulff, Ellis, Römer, Bardovi–Harlig, and LeBlanc (2009). The preference for focusing on converging results, while understandable, can distort our understanding of language phenomena, comparable to how a tendency to look for too much successful replication in experimental work—the so-called “publication bias”—can lead to a distorted interpretation of the phenomenon under study (Francis 2012). Our view is that both converging and diverging research outcomes have their proper place when it comes to advancing our knowledge about language, agreeing with the more nuanced discussion of the two kinds of outcomes to be found in Arppe and Järvikivi (2007), Ellis and Simpson-Vlach (2009), and Mollin (2014).
We illustrate these points by reference to the outcomes that emerge from applying different kinds of methodologies to the study of one English construction. We consider the relatively straightforward question of which nouns are preferred as syntactic subjects of the verb ROAR, using experimental methodology as well as a corpus-based methodology. For the experimental part, native speakers were simply asked to write out a sentence containing ROAR. Noun subjects of a verb use of ROAR in the resulting sentences were counted and the results pointed to one overwhelming finding: the word lion is by far the most preferred subject. For the corpus-based part of this study, we applied some familiar measures of association strength utilizing the Corpus of Contemporary American English COCA (Davies 2008-), exploring both the whole corpus as well as its main sub-genres. The association measures applied to the date included raw frequency of co-occurrence, reliance (cf. Schmid, 2010), Mutual Information, and Collostructional Analysis (cf. Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003). Interestingly, the corpus-based results do not point unequivocally (or at all) to the noun lion (or the semantic category [animal]) as the preferred syntactic subject of ROAR, presenting us therefore with what appears ot be a case of divergence of outcomes.
We discuss the significance of these results and argue that the divergence of outcomes reflects quite different, but equally valid, kinds of linguistic realities (cf. also Arppe & Järvikivi 2007).
Methods: Productive vocabulary scores from the narratives of 26 Somali-refugee children were compared to those of 24 immigrant children who spoke Hindi, Punjabi or Urdu. Children were living in Canada, had 9 months of exposure to English and were 4 years and 10 months old. In the immigrant group, children had an average of 1.91 siblings, whereas children in the Somali group had an average of 3.27 siblings.
Results: No significant difference was found in terms of productive vocabulary. There were, however, differences in the determinants of children’s English vocabulary size. For children in the immigrant group, higher amounts of maternal English input were associated with increased vocabulary. For children in the Somali group, maternal input had no significant effect on English vocabulary, but a higher amount of English input from siblings did positively impact scores.
This study reveals that despite the more challenging situations faced by refugee families (e.g., war and limited access to education prior to migration), the refugee group of children had comparable English development to the immigrant group. However, the aspect of these children’s home lives that supports English differed. Somali culture places greater responsibility on older siblings to care for younger siblings. Consequently, older siblings are more crucial language models. This study highlights that a child’s language learning can only be understood in the particular context of that child’s language experiences.
It is generally assumed that higher levels of maternal education will be associated with increased language abilities in children because mothers with higher levels of education provide their children with more linguistic input. This assumption, however, is based largely on studies about monolingual children. Existing research suggests that the relationship between maternal education and linguistic input is more complicated for child L2 learners. For example, some researchers have proposed that higher maternal education is associated with more first language (L1) input and less L2 input but others have suggested the opposite effect. Such discrepancies highlight the need to better understand the interdependencies between maternal education and linguistic input.
The specific research questions asked in this thesis are: (RQ1) Is maternal education a determinant of children’s L1 and L2 development? If so, are higher levels of education associated with higher language scores? (RQ2) Does maternal education impact the linguistic input migrant children receive at home? If so, does maternal education have the same effect on the linguistic input provided to immigrant compared to refugee children? (RQ3) Besides maternal education, what other variables influence the linguistic input children receive at home? (RQ4) Do these intermediary environment and input factors determine children’s L1 and L2 development? And, (RQ5) Do the results presented to address Question 1 align with the results presented to address Questions 2, 3 and 4?
Participants were 89 immigrant/refugee children, living in Canada with diverse L1s. They completed an English story-telling task. Their parents also answered detailed questions about L1 development, as well as demographic and linguistic input information. Regression modelling revealed that relative quantity of language use by the mother (input), the siblings (input) and the child (output) positively influenced children’s L1 and L2 development. Additionally, maternal L2 fluency and months of exposure to English at school (a cumulative input variable) had a positive impact on L2 scores. Maternal education was related to children’s input but the direction of the relationship depended on immigration status. For immigrant families, higher levels of education were associated with less English use. In the refugee group, higher levels of education were associated with more English use. Thus, as one example of interdependencies in bilingual acquisition, this study revealed a complex relationship between immigration status, maternal education, linguistic input and children’s bilingual development.
Such interdependencies highlight the fact that children’s language development must be considered within the complex system of children’s specific circumstances. For each child, environment- and input-level variables are interwoven to produce an individualized learning context. As a consequence, it is not simply variation in individual variables that underlies individual differences in bilingual children’s emerging abilities; variation in the interdependencies between variables is also fundamental to the process of acquisition.