Year: 2013
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Researchers have found that the home literacy environment (HLE) and the age of second language (L2) acquisition have a great impact on monolingual children's language development.The present study investigated the impact of HLE and the age of L2 acquisition on children's vocabulary and reading development in Chinese-English bilinguals.Fifty nine bilingual Chinese-English children participated in the study.Meanwhile, one parent filled out the questionnaire for child's language development history.Children completed vocabulary and reading tasks in both Chinese and English.Because of within and cross language effects, we hypothesized that parent-child reading and conversational activities were positively correlated with the vocabulary and reading development in both languages.We used partial correlations (controlling testing age) to test the hypotheses.We found that the more parents read with a child in English; the better was the child's reading development in English.In addition, the more parents talked with a child in Chinese, the better was the child's vocabulary in Chinese, but worse was the child's English vocabulary.Also, the more parents talked with a child in English, the better was the child's vocabulary and reading in English, but worse was the child's Chinese vocabulary.The results revealed that especially for vocabulary, using one language at home have positive influences on that language, but have negative influences on another language.
Author: Xinyue Liu
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2222219979