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The Effect of Dual Language Exposure on Single Language Development

Comparing Acquisition Rates in Bilingual and Monolingual Children
Wiechmann, D.; Kerz, E.; Steinfeld, J.

Publication date
2016
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Author accepted manuscript
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From variation to iconicity

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Citation for published version (APA):

Wiechmann, D., Kerz, E., & Steinfeld, J. (2016). The Effect of Dual Language Exposure on
Single Language Development: Comparing Acquisition Rates in Bilingual and Monolingual
Children. In A. Bannink, & W. Honselaar (Eds.), From variation to iconicity: festschrift for Olga
Fischer on the occasion of her 65th birthday (pp. 425-438). Uitgeverij Pegasus.

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The Effect of Dual Language Exposure on Single Language Development:

Comparing Acquisition Rates in Bilingual and Monolingual Children

Daniel Wiechmann1, Elma Kerz2 & Judith Steinfeld2

(1University of Amsterdam, 2RWTH Aachen University)

Abstract
A central question in bilingual child language acquisition research concerns the effect
of dual language exposure on the rate of language development. Previous research
has produced conflicting evidence: While some studies have reported similar
acquisition rates, other studies have found that bilingual children lag behind their
monolingual peers in their vocabulary and grammatical development. The goal of the
present study was to contribute to this ongoing debate by investigating acquisition
rates in bilingual and monolingual children in single language comparisons. Fifty
German kindergarten children aged from 4 to 6 years old participated in the study: 25
German-speaking monolingual children (mean age 63 months [SD=7.5 months]) and
25 bilingually developing children who acquired German in combination with another
language (mean age 64 months [SD=8.3 months]). We compared acquisition rates of
three global measures (MLU, vocabulary size and vocabulary growth rate) and five
local measures of language performance that served as proxies for the assessment
of the degree of development of complex sentences with adverbial clauses. We
found that – with the exception of MLU – the monolingually developing children were
significantly more advanced on all measures of language performance. Implications
for understanding bilingual development are discussed.

Keywords: bilingual child language acquisition, rate of development, complex

sentences

1 Introduction
The number of bilingually developing children is large and growing1, yet the language
development in bilingual children is still not well understood (McCardle & Hoff 2006).
The bilingual literature distinguishes between bilingual children who are exposed to

1
An estimated half of the world’s children grow up exposed to two or more languages
(Grosjean 2010).
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two languages from birth (‘simultaneous bilinguals’) and those who begin language
development as monolinguals but who are exposed to a second language later in
childhood (‘sequential bilinguals’). Simultaneous and sequential bilingualism are
conceived of as two different phenomena – bilingual first language acquisition and
child second language acquisition respectively (cf. Genesee & Nicoladis 2007;
Paradis 2007). While intuitively plausible, these two types are not easily
disentangled. De Houwer (2009: 2), for instance, defined ‘bilingual first language
acquisition’ as the “development of language in young children who hear two
languages spoken to them from birth” with “no chronological difference between the
two languages in terms of when the children started to hear them”. Other researchers
have proposed a cut-off of exposure to two languages at the age of three (e.g.
McLaughlin 1984) or at the age of four (e.g. Genesee & Nicoladis 2007).
In the bilingual child language acquisition literature, there has been an
increasing interest in the effects of dual language exposure on child language
development (cf. Hoff, Core, Rumiche, Senor & Parra 2012). Much of this interest
resolves around questions concerning the course of development and the rate of
development: (1) Do monolingual and bilingual children share the same
developmental milestones? and (2) Do bilingual and monolingual children showcase
the same speed of language acquisition? Concerning the course of development,
there is a general agreement that bilingual children follow the same acquisition
stages as their monolingual peers, starting off with babbling and one word
utterances, followed by multi-word utterances and ending with complex sentences
(cf. De Houwer 2009). There is, however, less agreement with regard to the rate of
development. While some studies found no difference when bilingual children were
compared to monolingual children with regard to vocabulary and grammatical
development in the language both groups were acquiring (e.g., De Houwer,
Bornstein & Putnik 2013; Paradis 2010; Paradis, Crago & Genesee 2005; Smithson,
Paradis & Nicoladis 2014), other studies have found that bilingual children lag behind
their monolingual peers in their vocabulary and grammatical development when
measured in each language separately (cf. Bialystok & Feng 2011; Bialystok, Luk,
Peets & Yang 2010; Gathercole & Thomas 2009; Hoff, Core, Place, Rumiche, Señor
& Parra 2012; Marchman et al. 2010; Place & Hoff 2011; Thordardotir, Rothenberg,
Rivard & Naves 2006; Vagh, Pan & Mancilla-Martinez 2009). It is important to note at
this point that this does not imply that bilingual children are confused or slowed down
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in their ability to acquire language. Infants growing up bilingually have the capacity
very early in life to separate, categorize and begin to learn their two languages by
relying on surface acoustic information (cf. Werker & Byers-Heinlein 2008). Previous
studies have also shown that bilingual children are not delayed in the rate at which
they acquire linguistic knowledge in total. For example, a study by Hoff et al. (2012)
found that while monolingual children outperformed bilingual children in single
language comparisons, they were comparable on a measure of total vocabulary.
However, there is still conflicting evidence as to whether language development in
bilingual children proceeds at the same pace as in monolingual children with regard
to acquiring the vocabulary and grammatical constructions of each language, i.e. the
effect of dual language exposure is on single language development is still uncertain.
Most of the studies on the effects of dual language exposure on the rate of
development have used global measures of language development, such as mean
length of utterance or total vocabulary size. To our knowledge, no study has
investigated language development using local measures that indicate how
advanced is the child’s use of particular linguistic constructions. Complex sentences
(CSs) are particularly well suited to such investigations. The ability to produce and
comprehend CSs is often considered to mark a final stage in child language
acquisition (cf. Clahsen’s 1986 phase model with five general developmental phases;
Saxton 2010; Clark 2016). CSs have played an important role in the development of
theories of child language acquisition. The acquisition of these constructions has
been the focus of much debate between generative and usage-based accounts of
syntactic development in children (cf. Borer & Wexler 1987; Bowerman 1979; Brandt,
Diessel & Tomasello 2008; Cheng & Corver 2006; Chomsky 1967; Dabrowska,
Rowland & Theakston 2009; Diessel 2004; Diessel and Tomasello 2000). Generative
accounts hold that children acquire syntactic constructions by activating an innate set
of rules (cf. Pinker 1984). The activation of a rule requires a sufficient amount of
input, but once it is acquired, children are in the position to produce and comprehend
the relevant structures equally well across different contexts, meaning that they move
from a no-knowledge state to a full-knowledge state. In contrast, usage-based
accounts hold that children gradually build up knowledge about the usage conditions
of a construction (cf. Diessel 2004; Tomasello 2003), meaning that “to know a
construction isn’t an all-or-nothing-state” (Arnon 2011: 82). In addition to highlighting
the piecemeal bottom-up nature of the acquisition process, usage-based accounts
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have demonstrated the item-based or exemplar-based nature of the development of

grammatical knowledge: children’s earliest constructions are organized around
specific lexical material and only gradually become increasingly more complex and
diverse. The bulk of research on the acquisition of CSs has focused on children’s
comprehension of such constructions in experiments. Most of the studies reported
that children have difficulties comprehending CSs until well into the school years. In
what is to date the most extensive production study on children’s acquisition of CSs,
Diessel (2004) has shown that while the earliest CSs emerge around the second
birthday, they are less complex and more concrete than CSs in adult speech, i.e.
they are organized around concrete lexical material and, although they consist of two
clauses, they only encode a single proposition and do not involve embedding. More
complex, elaborated, adult-like versions of CSs encoding two propositions in two full-
fledged clauses emerge only gradually during the preschool years. These findings
explain why children have difficulties comprehending CSs in experiments, while at
the same time beginning to use them at an early age. As pointed out by Diessel
(2004: 175),

[i]f we acknowledge that the acquisition process proceeds in a piecemeal

bottom-up fashion, and the development of complex sentences originates from
simple item-based constructions, the discrepancy between children’s
performance and their use of complex sentence in spontaneous speech
disappears.

The goal of the present study is to contribute to the ongoing discussion regarding the
rate of development in bilingually developing children in comparison to monolingually
developing children. Couched within usage-based accounts of child language
acquisition, the study focuses on the effect of dual language exposure on
grammatical and vocabulary development in a single language comparison. The
novel contribution of the study is the use of children’s spontaneous speech and the
inclusion of local measures intended to capture the gradual and item-based nature of
language development. These local measures will serve as proxies for the
assessment of the degree of development of CSs with adverbial clauses (ACs) in
preschool bilingual and monolingual children.
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2 Method
Participants
Fifty German kindergarten children aged from 4 to 6 years old participated in the
study: 25 German-speaking monolingual children (mean age 63 months [SD=7.5
months]) and 25 bilingually developing children who acquired German in combination
with another language (mean age 64 months [SD=8.3 months]). The groups were
comparable with respect to gender (χ2(1) = 0.08, p > 0.77), age (t(47.55) = -0.34, p >
0.73) and the mean number of word tokens a child contributed to the corpus
(meanmonolingual = 1088.64; meanbilingual = 814.00; t(46.13) = -1.8938, p > 0.06). For the
bilingual group, we used caregiver instruments modeled on the Alberta Language
Environment Questionnaire (Paradis, Emmerzael & Sorenson Duncan 2010) to
assess information about a child’s learning environment, such as whether a child has
been exposed to two languages from birth or from entering kindergarten (AGE OF
ONSET), the dominant language at home or the typological proximity of the languages
acquired. Since pairwise partial correlations revealed that with the exception of AGE
OF ONSET none of the variables was significantly related to any of the performance
indicators, they will not be further treated in this study. Following McLaughlin (1984),
we used a cut-off point of 3 years to distinguish between simultaneous bilingual
children (N=12) from sequential bilingual learners (N=13).
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Table 1. Participants’ age, gender and number of words contributed to corpus

Group Age Gender Word token in corpus
Monolingual mean = 5;3 female: 16; mean = 1088.64
(N = 25) (SD = 7.5) male: 9 (SD = 561.92)
Bilingual mean = 5;4 female: 14; mean = 814
(N = 25) (SD = 8.3) male: 11 (SD = 458.29)
Simultaneous mean = 5;1 female: 7; mean = 739.17
(N = 12) (SD = 8.8) male: 5 (SD =352.17)
Sequential mean = 5;5 female: 7; mean = 883.1
(N = 13) (SD = 5.9) male: 6 (SD = 543.7)

Procedure
Data elicitation: All children watched a 6.5-minute episode of a popular stop-motion
animated children’s television series. The children were then given a visual cue to a
particular scene and asked to describe what happened in that scene. All verbal
interactions between the children and the experimenter were audio-recorded.

Transcription of speech: Transcripts were made from collected audio recordings. All
experimenter and child speech was transcribed. The transcription of child speech
resulted in two corpora representing spontaneous speech produced by the bilingual
children (21,023 word tokens) and their monolingual peers (27,301 tokens). The flow
of speech for both children and the experiment was divided into utterances. We
defined an utterance as having a single intonational contour within a single
conversational turn and consisting of one or more syntactic units, i.e. phrases or
clauses. An utterance was usually preceded and followed by a pause. An utterance
could contain a single word (eis), a single phrase (in die Küche), a simple sentence
(dann sind die alle runtergefallen), or a multi-clause sentence ([da muessen die
immer alles aufbauen] [AC weil ein paar sachen kaputt sind]).

Language performance measures

Global Measures: Three global measures of child language development were
considered: a measure of grammatical development, MEAN LENGTH OF UTTERANCE
(MLU) and two measures of vocabulary development, VOCABULARY SIZE (VS) and
VOCABULARY GROWTH RATE (VGR). The first measure – MLU – is used as a general
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indicator of syntactic development (Brown 1973). MLU was calculated as the number
of orthographic words produced per utterance. The vocabulary development was
assessed using two indicators of vocabulary richness – VS and VGR. The VS is defined
as the number of unique words (word types) that appear in a corpus. The VGR is
defined as the number of hapax legomena, i.e. the word types that occur only once in
the corpus, divided by the total number of word tokens in the corpus (cf. Baayen
2008). Since these two vocabulary measures are sensitive to corpus size, the
monolingual corpus was reduced to the size of the smaller, bilingual corpus, i.e. to
21,023 words.

Local Measures: Building upon usage-based accounts of child language acquisition

and, in particular, Diessel’s (2004) account of the acquisition of complex sentences, a
set of local measures was derived to assess the advancedness of CSs with ACs use
in child productions. Diessel (2004) showed that the earliest ACs produced by
children are intonationally unbound utterances which follow the semantically
associated clauses. Over time, children learn to elaborate these structures and
integrate them with an associated main clause. The last step in mastering such
constructions involves the capacity to produce bi-clausal units with sentence-initial
ACs. This gradual development proceeds in an item-based fashion, i.e. children’s
earliest productions are organized around a restricted set of adverbial subordinators.
Over time this set is broadened to include a wider range of subordinators. To
determine the advancedness of the target constructions in children’s productions, we
assessed for each child the number of different subordinators heading the AC
(RANGE.SUB), the proportion of integrated ACs (INTEGRATED) and the proportion of
sentence-initial ACs (INITIAL). In addition to these three measures, we also assessed
the MLU of an AC (MLU.AC) and the proportion of ACs with sentence-final verbs
(POS.VERB) (for the description of the so-called “verb-second effect”, cf. Meisel 2006:
99f). Table 2 presents an overview of all performance measures investigated in the
present study.
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Table 2: Overview of all performance measures investigated

Type # Name Description

1 Mean length of utterance (in words)
GLOBAL

MLU

2 VS Vocabulary size
3 VGR Vocabulary growth rate
4 MLU.AC Mean length of AC (in words)
5 VERB.POS Proportion of correct verb positioning
LOCAL

6 RANGE.SUB Number of different subordinators used

Proportion of ACs that are integrated into multi-clause
7 INTEGRATED
construction
8 INITIAL Proportion of integrated ACs that are sentence-initial

Statistical Analysis:
With the exception of the two global vocabulary measures, all language performance
measures were analyzed using Generalized Additive Models (Hastie & Tibshirani
1990) using the MGCV package (Mixed GAM Computation Vehicle with
GCV/AIC/REML Smoothness Estimation; Wood 2011) for the statistical software
system R (R Core Team 2015). Children’s scores on each performance measure
were used as the predicted variables in the models. We entered AGE as a penalized
regression spline with up to five degrees of freedom as a control variable. To assess
whether performance was affected by dual language exposure, we added the term
GROUP to the model, which distinguished monolingually and bilingually developing
children. Likelihood ratio tests were used to determine if the inclusion of GROUP led to
a statistically significant increase in model fit. For the local measures, the analysis
was extended to investigate if performance was affected by the age of onset of
learning German. To this end additional models were fitted where performance on a
given measure was modeled as a function of AGE and a three-level factor that
distinguished monolingual children from simultaneously and sequentially bilingually
developing children. Differences in performance between simultaneous and
sequential bilinguals were assessed by comparing a model that included GROUP as a
two-level factor with a model that instead included GROUP as a three-level factor. To
assess if the productions of monolingual and bilingual children differed with regard to
VS and VGR, we made use of the COMPARE.RICHNESS.FNC function provided by the
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package LANGUAGER for R (Baayen 2013), which is based on LNRE models (cf.
Baayen 2008).

Results
Before we turn to the local language performance measures, we briefly present the
results of the analyses of the three global measures. The analysis of MLU scores
indicated that bilingual and monolingual children were comparable on that measure
(MLUmonolingual = 7.8 [SD = 2.37], MLUbilingual = 7.41 [SD = 2.11]). Model comparisons
using the likelihood ratio test showed that GROUP was not a significant predictor
(Δχ2=2.32, p > 0.48). The analysis of vocabulary richness scores revealed significant
differences in both VS (number of types in monolingual corpus = 3220, number of
types in bilingual corpus = 2779, z = -8.36, p > 0.0001) and VGR (monolingual VGR =
0.09, bilingual VGR = 0.07, z = 5.72, p < 0.0001). Turning to the results of local
language performance measures, we found 1,021 utterances containing ACs in our
data: 601 in the monolingual corpus and 420 in the bilingual corpus (simultaneous =
183; sequential = 237). An overview of mean performance and standard deviations
across measures and groups is presented in Table 3.

Table 3: Univariate descriptive statistics on local performance measures

mean mean mean mean
Group MLU.AC
VERB.POS INTEGRATED INITIAL RANGE.SUB
Monolingual 11.41 (2.96) 0.66 (0.25) 0.52 (0.24) 0.12 (0.08) 4.67 (1.83)
Bilingual 9.26 (3.07) 0.59 (0.31) 0.31 (0.34) 0.04 (0.07) 2.35 (1.43)
Simultaneous 9.23 (2.83) 0.61 (0.32) 0.32 (0.29) 0.05 (0.1) 2.62 (1.59)
Sequential 9.29 (3.32) 0.56 (0.31) 0.30 (0.37) 0.03 (0.05 2.29 (1.38)

We found that monolingually developing children were significantly more advanced

than the bilingually developing children on all local measures of performance (MLU.AC
Δχ2 = 1292.43, p < 0.0001, VERB.POS Δχ2 = 1.23, p < 0.0001, INTEGRATED Δχ2 = 2.87,
p < 0.0001, INITIAL Δχ2 = 0.58, p < 0.0001, and RANGE.SUB Δχ2 = 1110.10, p <
0.0001). We further found that the performance of simultaneous bilinguals was
significantly better than the performance of sequential bilinguals for all measures with
the exception of MLU.AC and VERB.POS (INTEGRATED Δχ2 = 1.03, p < 0.0001, INITIAL Δχ2
= 0.05, p < 0.001, RANGE.SUB Δχ2 = 17.57, p < 0.05, MLU.AC Δχ2 = 4.57, p > 0.33,
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VERB.POS Δχ2 = 0.09, p > 0.11). A graphical representation of the results is shown in
Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Perspective plots of model predictions for all local measures of language
performance

Discussion
The purpose of this study was to contribute to the ongoing discussion regarding
whether language development in bilingual children proceeds at the same rate as in
monolingual children in acquiring vocabulary and grammatical knowledge. Previous
studies have typically used standardized parent-report questionnaires assessing
children’s language development and have primarily employed global receptive
measures of language performance, such as vocabulary size. The novelty of the
present study lies in the use of children’s spontaneous speech and the inclusion of
local measures serving as proxies for the assessment of the degree of development
of the target constructions. We investigated the rate of development in 50 bilingually
and monolingually developing children aged 4 to 6 years using three global and five
local measures of language performance in single language comparisons (German).
We found no difference in rate of development with respect to the global
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measure of MLU. This contrasts with previous studies that have reported bilinguals to
lag behind their monolingual peers on MLU-based measures (e.g., Hoff et al., 2012;
Blom 2010). These studies have focused on a younger cohort between 1.5 and 3
years of age, where MLU is shown to be a sensitive indicator of grammatical
development. However, in later stages of development “much of the growth in
complexity is the result of internal reorganization of utterance form, rather than
addition of new structure” (Owens 1999: 190) and associated developmental
achievements include the use of wh-questions, noun and verb phrase elaboration
and complex sentences (Retherford 2000).
Turning to vocabulary development, we found that the monolingual children
were more advanced than the bilingual children on measures of VS and VGR. This is
consistent with previous studies. Bilingual children typically obtain lower scores than
monolinguals on measures of both receptive (Bialystock, Luk, Peets & Yang 2010;
Calvo & Bialystock 2014) and productive vocabulary (Hoff, Rumiche, Burridge, Ribot,
& Welsh 2014; Oller & Eilers 2002)2. Using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, a
more recent large-scale study of more than 1,700 bilingual children between ages 3
and 10 years, Bialystok, Luk, Peets & Yang (2010), reported significantly higher
scores for monolinguals at every age examined.
The analyses of local measures revealed that achievement in all major
milestones of producing ACs described in Diessel (2004) was affected by dual
language exposure: children exposed to only one language were more advanced
than children exposed to two languages with regard to the proportion of ACs that
were integrated into a multi-clause structure, the proportion of ACs in sentence-initial
positions, and the range of different subordinators used. We also found that
monolingual children produced ACs that on average were longer and had a larger
proportion of verb-final word order. At this point we would like to note that,
while limitations in sample size preclude a definitive conclusion, visual inspection of
the development of performance over time suggested a catching-up effect in bilingual
children: for virtually all local performance measures the distance to monolingual
performance levels decreased towards the end of the age range examined (between
ages 5-6).
The findings presented in the current study suggest that the rate of language

2
But see De Houwer, Bornstein & Putnik (2013) for an exception.
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development is paced by children’s access to input, as children whose daily

language exposure is divided between two or more languages are, on average, likely
to be exposed to less of each language than children whose daily language exposure
is in only a single language (see, for example, De Houwer 2009; Hoff et al. 2012;
Paradis, Nicoladis, Crag, & Genesee 2011). Differences in the sheer amount of input
could also explain the finding that simultaneous bilinguals outperformed sequential
bilinguals in our study. UB-oriented research has underlined the ubiquity of frequency
effects in monolingual language acquisition (see Ambridge, Kidd, Rowland &
Theakston 2015 for a recent review). Recent research on bilingual child language
development is consistent with this by-now large literature on monolingual
development that finds that variability among children in their rates of development is
predicted by the amount of language input they are exposed to. For example, Hoff et
al. (2012) have reported that within the bilingually developing sample, all measures of
vocabulary and grammar were related to the relative amount of input in that
language. In addition to the amount of input, socio-economic status has been shown
to be another important child-external factor to affect language development in
bilingual children (Calvo & Bialystock 2014). As mentioned above, we investigated a
set of child-external variables regarding the children’s learning environments but
found no correlations with any of the language performance indicators. As the
present study was limited in statistical power, future work is needed to determine the
effects of child external factors on the rate of development.
Despite its limitations, we believe that the inclusion of local measures intended
to capture the gradual and item-based nature of language development has the
potential to lead towards a more nuanced understanding language performance and
can inform the development of bilingual language norms. An adequate understanding
of what can be expected of bilingually developing preschool children is of critical
importance to avoid the interpretation of their linguistic behavior as symptomatic of
delay or even impairment when, in fact, it is typical of children acquiring more than
one language (see e.g. Genesee 2006, for a discussion).

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