Language Delay and Amount of Exposure to the Language: Two (Un)Related Phenomena in Early Spanish-Basque Bilingualism

Abstract

This chapter investigates the effect of the amount of exposure to the Basque language on the expressive vocabulary and grammar size of early bilingual children exposed to B(asque) and S(panish) in their closest family environment from a very early age, and with a varying degree of (relative) BIS input. Four groups are distinguished: (a) Basque monolinguals; (b) Basque-dominant bilinguals; (c) Balanced bilinguals and (d) Spanish-dominant bilinguals, and three levels of vocabulary knowledge, based on the Percentiles (P) of expressive vocabulary: (a) large (P > 90); (b) normal (P10-90); and (c) small vocabulary size (P < 10). The chapter focuses specifically on the effect of the amount of exposure to the language, on bilinguals' linguistic level, paying special attention to children located at the lowest percentiles (P < 10) of expressive vocabulary in Basque, the minority language. The sample of 975 children, gathered using the Basque version of the MacArthur-Bates Test Communicative Developmental Inventories, the CDI-2 (Barrena et al. 2008), revealed that 16-30-month-old children with a high amount of exposure to the minority language are not an exception among those with the smallest vocabulary size, and also that some children with a low amount of exposure may belong to those of P > 90. A more in-depth analysis of a set of sociolinguistic and biogenetic variables, potentially affecting expressive vocabulary, revealed that the weak effect of the amount of exposure appears as the largest from the 12 independent variables tested in 16-30-month-old children. The same analysis with a restricted sample of 26-30-month-olds revealed a higher effect of this and other weak sociolinguistic variables, such as parents' communicative language and mother's first language. Finally, the current study highlights the need to take into account children's relative input in order to properly identify bilinguals at risk of linguistic delay, who may be erroneously considered as such (false positives) in those cases where they are assessed only in the language to which they have a low(er) degree of exposure. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)