The Active Bilingual Child: The Relationship Between Bilingual Children’s Communicative Behaviors and Caregiver Language Input

Abstract

The language environment is bidirectional. Both the caregivers and the child shape the quality, quantity, and content of the language environment, and, as a result, the child’s language learning. The majority of existing research, especially with bilingual children, focuses on the effects of caregiver input on language learning and ignores the active role of the child in their own language learning. This study begins to unpack how bilingual children shape their language learning, by examining the relationship between the child’s behaviors and caregiver language input. We coded and analyzed 32 Spanish-English bilingual play sessions to explore this relationship. Significant variability was seen across families in both the child’s behaviors (gestures and vocalizations) and in the caregiver’s language input. Children were found to vocalize and gesture more when caregivers were speaking one language versus another, but this was not linked to language dominance. In some instances, caregivers were found to increase language mixing around child gestures, but this pattern did not hold for child vocalizations. The child’s behavior during the sessions nor the amount of caregiver language mixing were significant predictors of the child's vocabulary size a year later. This study points to bilingual children’s gestures as having some impact or relation to the moment to moment language input they receive from caregivers. Future research should further examine how the bilingual child’s behavior in moment to moment settings influences their language learning environment.