Dear Susannah,<br><br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>Best,<br>Kathleen<br><br>Kathleen Peets<br>Assistant Professor<br>Ryerson University<br>School of Early Childhood Education<br><a href="mailto:kpeets@ryerson.ca">kpeets@ryerson.ca</a><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 10:41 PM, Susannah Kirby <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:suki@ibiblio.org">suki@ibiblio.org</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">Dear Info-Childes community,<br><div class="gmail_quote"><br>I have a research conundrum, and I'm hoping you can assess one possible solution to it that I've come up with. <br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br><br>Thanks in advance for any insight and suggestions you can offer!<br>
<br>Best,<br><font color="#888888">Susannah Kirby<br>SFU Linguistics<br>
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