can bilinguals "replace" monolinguals in experimental data collection?

[Kathleen Peets]

Dear Susannah,

I agree with the concerns that the others have posted, and I would follow up
on Caroline Rowland's idea to embrace the population. I have the same
challenge of finding monolinguals in Toronto, so I am building bilingualism
into the design using regression models.

In your case, because you are looking at a specific feature of grammar, I
would recommend trying to look at monolinguals and one or two homogenous
bilingual groups. My groups in Toronto are always heterogeneous - a sample
of 25 bilinguals may represent 15 languages. While you may find the same in
Vancouver, there are also certain languages that are better represented
there than others. For example, you could look at an east Asian language
group based on a potential verb-bias in acquisition. You could even study
this with English data only, although it would be obviously wonderful to
have first language data, too.

I hope this doesn't create more challenge than solution for you, but there
is enough research to show differences in rate of acquisition as a function
of when L1 and L2 were acquired, patterns of dominance, rate of usage,
proficiency, etc., that including a bilingual group without special
consideration within a monolingual group is problematic.

Best,
Kathleen

Kathleen Peets
Assistant Professor
Ryerson University
School of Early Childhood Education
kpeets at ryerson.ca

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 10:41 PM, Susannah Kirby <suki at ibiblio.org> wrote:

> Dear Info-Childes community,
>
> I have a research conundrum, and I'm hoping you can assess one possible
> solution to it that I've come up with.
>
> I have been investing verb-learning in monolingual children, but in my
> current location (Vancouver, BC), monolingual children are nearly impossible
> to find!  On the other hand, bilingual kids are extremely easy to recruit.
>
> I'm wondering how methodologically unsound it would be to allow bilingual
> children to participate (not mixed in with monolinguals, but as their own
> participant group), and then to recruit slightly older children. So for
> instance, my target age range for monolinguals is 3-4 years old; for
> bilinguals, I might use 4-5 (or even 5-6) year olds. I would also ask for
> parents to estimate what percentage of the day the kids hear English input,
> and shoot for, say, a 50%+ range.
>
> Is this solution too problematic to even try? I can see reasons why it
> might or might not work, but I'm almost at the end of my rope, in terms of
> my recruitment problems.
>
> Thanks in advance for any insight and suggestions you can offer!
>
> Best,
> Susannah Kirby
> SFU Linguistics
>
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