<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Dear Susannah,<div><br></div><div>I am curious as to what your thinking is with regards to the age of your bilingual participants: You want to look at verb learning, and you assume that you need to raise your age-level by one or even two years to observe the same phenomenon in bilingual children? In other words, you expect a 1-2 year delay in level of grammatical knowledge or...? I don't work in this area (3-4-yr old grammar), so others will have to respond, but I don't see any reason to raise the age level at all. Bilingual children have somewhat smaller lexicons in each language but their progress is not notably smaller, as far as I know or have observed. </div><div><br></div><div>Another question is: Will you be looking only at English, since I imagine the bilinguals in Vancouver speak a wide range of different languages, which you presumably don't have the resources to investigate? Then I think the main thing will be to be sure that English is the dominant language, since a language that is NOT the primary one for a child, i.e., not the one used with the most regularity, is much more unpredictable in terms of how the grammar develops (some areas can be expected to show lags or heavy influence from the stronger lg.). In contrast, I suspect that learning advances in the dominant language are not significantly different from those of monolingual children in that language, even though there is always some influence from the other language - but in a group of children whose 2nd language is not the same, the differences would cancel out in a sense - i.e., whatever patterns you see, should be comparable to English-only learners. Maybe not all reviewers of your study would see it this way - but after all, bilingualism is really the norm, so it seems odd to have to avoid studying bilinguals to gain knowledge about lg. dev. generally!</div><div><br></div><div>I'm sure others will have something more substantial to say, but the question is so interesting, I had to respond!</div><div><br></div><div>-marilyn</div><div><br><div><div>On 14 Sep 2011, at 03:41, Susannah Kirby wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite">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> </font></div><br><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div> -- <br> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Info-CHILDES" group.<br> To post to this group, send email to <a href="mailto:info-childes@googlegroups.com">info-childes@googlegroups.com</a>.<br> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to <a href="mailto:info-childes+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com">info-childes+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com</a>.<br> For more options, visit this group at <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en">http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en</a>.<br> </blockquote></div><br><div> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; ">Marilyn M. Vihman<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; ">Professor, Language and Linguistic Science<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; ">V/C/210, 2nd Floor, Block C, Vanbrugh College<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; ">University of York<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; ">Heslington<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; ">York YO10 5DD<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; ">tel 01904 433612<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; ">fax 01904 432673</span></div></div><div><br></div></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br></div></body></html>
<p></p>
-- <br />
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Info-CHILDES" group.<br />
To post to this group, send email to info-childes@googlegroups.com.<br />
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to info-childes+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.<br />
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en.<br />