The role of parental characteristics, home language use, and schooling in children's Mandarin heritage language development in Canada
Daskalaki, Evangelia (University of Alberta. Department of Linguistics)
Soto-Corominas, Adriana (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Xia, Vera Yunxiao (University of Alberta. Department of Linguistics)
Paradis, Johanne (University of Alberta. Department of Linguistics)

Date:	2024
Description:	15 pàg.
Abstract:	Introduction: This study on child HL (heritage language) speakers of Mandarin examines the associations between parental characteristics (attitudes and proficiency), children's HL use (at home and through schooling), and children's HL outcomes (in vocabulary and simple syntax). Methods: Forty-seven Mandarin-English bilingual children of Chinese heritage (mean age: 10. 5; age range: 6. 8-16. 2) residing in Western Canada participatedin the study. All children were second-generation immigrants, and received one of three types of schooling. There were 11 children who attended Englishonly schools (English school group), 21 who attended English-only schools but also after-school heritage Mandarin classes (Heritage school group), and 15 who attended English-Mandarin bilingual schools (Bilingual school group). The children were administered two tasks: a picture-naming task targeting Mandarin vocabulary (LITMUS-CLT) and an experimental elicitation task targeting Mandarin wh-interrogative sentences (an early-acquired structure). Parents were administered a questionnaire about home language environment, attitudes toward Mandarin transmission, and their children's schooling choices. Results: Results showed that positive parental attitudes and lower parental proficiency in English were associated with more Mandarin use at home. More Mandarin use at home, in turn, was associated with larger vocabularies and more accurate production of interrogatives. By contrast, school type was only associated with vocabulary and not syntax: the Bilingual school group had larger vocabularies than the English school group. Discussion: Overall, these results show how parental characteristics may influence input factors, which in turn may dierentially aect the acquisition of vocabulary vs. early-acquired syntactic structures.
Grants:	Generalitat de Catalunya SGR-Cat 2021
Note:	Altres ajuts: This study was supported by (i) 2020-2024 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)
Rights:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Subject:	HL schooling ; HL home language use ; Parental attitudes ; Parental proficiency ; Vocabulary ; Syntax ; Mandarin
Published in:	Frontiers in psychology, Vol. 3 (2024) , art. 1435200, ISSN 1664-1078

DOI: 10.3389/flang.2024.1435200

15 p, 756.4 KB

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