can bilinguals "replace" monolinguals in experimental data collection?

[Johanne Paradis]

Dear Susannah

I would like to echo the comments of my colleagues in saying that the extent to which bilingual development and monolingual development are similar or different is complex, and a simple change in the age of participants recruited for a study would not turn bilinguals into monolingual equivalents.  I would also like to echo the comments my colleagues in encouraging you to see the potential in studying bilingual children for any research question in language acquisition.

Understanding the type of bilingual children you are dealing with is a crucial first step.  I imagine that in Vancouver, like Edmonton, the majority of bilingual children are English second language learners from immigrant and refugee families with diverse first language/cultural backgrounds, East and South Asian being the most numerous.  I have worked extensively with ESL children aged 4-6 in Edmonton, and for the majority of them, English is not their dominant language at this age, but children do vary in how much English they have been exposed to and in what context.  Obtaining information on individual children's exposure to English is vital to interpreting results; simply labelling them all as "bilingual" may not be sufficient to understand all the variation in the data. This information is most often obtained via parent questionnaire.  If you are interested in the questionnaires we use in my lab, you can go to the Child ESL Centre website that we have just launched, and download them: 

http://www.chesl.ualberta.ca


Please don't hesitate to get in touch if you have questions about working with ESL children and their families.

Best wishes,
Johanne


On 2011-09-13, at 8:41 PM, Susannah Kirby 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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************************************************************
Johanne Paradis | Professor | Department of Linguistics  
4-46 Assiniboia Hall | University of Alberta | Edmonton, AB | T6G 2E7 | Canada
tel:	1 (780) 492-0805 | fax:	1 (780) 492-0806 | http://www.ualberta.ca/~jparadis/   





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