can bilinguals "replace" monolinguals in experimental data collection?

[marilyn vihman]

Dear Susannah,

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.

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!

I'm sure others will have something more substantial to say, but the  
question is so interesting, I had to respond!

-marilyn

On 14 Sep 2011, at 03:41, 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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Marilyn M. Vihman
Professor, Language and Linguistic Science
V/C/210, 2nd Floor, Block C, Vanbrugh College
University of York
Heslington
York YO10 5DD
tel 01904 433612
fax 01904 432673




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