Parental Discourse Strategies in Relation to Children’s Expressive Vocabulary
Emma Verhoeven, Ora Oudgenoeg-Paz, Merel van Witteloostuijn, Elma BlomAims and objectives:
Parents and practitioners often assume that languages are better acquired when separated and wonder how to respond to bilingual children’s language mixing. This study investigates which discourse strategies parents employ in response to children’s instances of language mixing and how these strategies relate to children’s expressive vocabulary outcomes in the minority language over time.
Methodology:
The study has a two-wave design. At Time 1, 86 families with 3- to 6-year-old bilingual children reported which parental discourse strategies they employed. At Time 2, approximately 13 months later, 50 families participated again. All families lived in the Netherlands and belonged to one of three different language groups (Polish/Turkish/English). Children’s expressive vocabulary outcomes were measured with the cross-linguistic lexical task.
Data and Analysis:
Parental discourse strategies were explored descriptively. Between-group differences were analyzed with a Kruskal–Wallis
Findings:
The most reported strategy was to repeat children’s mixed utterances in the target language. Parents from the English group used more bilingual discourse strategies (i.e., allowing both languages to be used within the same conversation). Parents from the Polish and Turkish groups used more monolingual strategies (i.e., enforcing the child to adhere to one single language). Parental discourse strategies did not relate to children’s expressive vocabulary outcomes—not in the simultaneous nor in the sequential analysis.
Originality:
This study is the first to relate parental discourse strategies to children’s expressive vocabulary outcomes in a larger sample, consisting of three different bilingual populations, with a two-wave design.
Implications:
Parents do not need to employ strict monolingual discourse strategies to facilitate children’s expressive language development.