By Charlene N. Rivera-Bonet | Waisman Science Writer
Bilingual children can be flexible in the ways they learn two languages simultaneously. Although the rate of learning might differ between strategies, children can learn novel words in both English and Spanish within the same span of time they learn words in only English, a new study shows. Finding the best strategies for dual language learning can help optimize the process as well as inform new interventions for bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD).
The study, from the lab of Waisman Center investigator Margarita Kaushanskaya, PhD, professor and department chair of communication sciences and disorders, investigated the role of dual- and single-language input in bilingual children’s word learning. The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, and is part of a bigger series of studies aimed at trying to understand how bilingual children learn two languages.
When you compare bilingual children with monolingual children in one language, they tend to be a little behind with smaller single-language vocabularies. However, the total known words aggregated across languages in bilingual children is comparable or exceeds that of monolingual children. “There are all sorts of explanations for gap in language-specific vocabulary,” Kaushanskaya says.
One explanation is the role of competition, which means that if you know a word in one language and you’re trying to learn it in another language, that knowledge from the prior language can compete and prevent you from learning it in the new one. This study set out to test this theory.
All of the children who participated in the study were bilingual. Some had a developmental language disorder. They had two sets of experiments. In the first experiment, Spanish-English bilingual children were taught a set of novel words exclusively in English (single-language condition). Another set of words was first taught in Spanish, followed by English (dual-learning condition). In this condition, the children were already exposed to the Spanish novel word before learning it in English, therefore testing the theory of competition. “The main result is that bilinguals did learn words successfully in both conditions,” says Emma Libersky, doctoral student in Kaushanskaya’s lab and first author of the study.
The bilingual children showed better learning in the single-language condition, when only learning words in English, but they successfully learned both Spanish and English novel words in the dual-language condition. Better learning of the word in Spanish was associated with better learning of the word in English, muddying the role of competition in language learning.
“So essentially, in the same number of exposures, you can have learning in two languages. And it’s going to be a little bit less robust than if you do all of your exposures in just English. But you’re learning two languages, right?” Kaushanskaya says. “You’re kind of getting double the bang for the buck.”
For learning novel words, Kaushanskaya explains, lots of exposure to the novel word in one language seems to generate robust learning. Based on this, they are still trying to figure out what the most efficient strategy is for bilingual learners. “And it may be that the efficient strategy is in fact to block language exposures, right? So, do it in one language, give them a little bit of a break and then do it in the other language,” she says. “But a lot of the work in the lab is trying to get it straight.”
In the second experiment, the researchers paired each language with a speaker to test the one person-one language theory. The idea behind this theory is that each language is taught by a specific person to reduce confusion. For example, in a two-parent household, one parent will speak to the child in English, while the other parent speaks in Spanish. “And it seems so intuitive, that it would be just a really, really good way of helping children make sense of the two languages in their environment because children are very sensitive to talkers,” Kaushanskaya says. However, their results revealed very little benefit to this strategy, making it no better than having a single bilingual speaker.
One important part of the study was to evaluate how language ability altered the effects of dual-learning exposure. Their findings indicated that children’s language ability had minimal impact on learning words in two languages. “We have never, I think, observed an effect that was specific to children with DLD. They struggle with learning, of course. Language ability matters. But it’s not like they struggle with dual language learning more than children without any language difficulties or delays,” Kaushanskaya says.
Caitlin Slawny, MS, CCC-SLP, doctoral student in Kaushanskaya’s lab and study author, says that this knowledge may inform how bilingual clinicians work with bilingual children that have DLD.
In the future, the researchers hope to expand this work to populations with different neurodevelopmental disabilities, use other word types such as verbs, and see if these results hold when learning a different language than Spanish.
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