The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on multilingual families in the Netherlands.

As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, public life in many countries ground to a halt in early 2020. The aims of this study were (i) to uncover the language practices of multilingual families during the pandemic, in general and especially regarding homeschooling; and (ii) to determine to what extent the changes in circumstance caused by the pandemic impacted children's language use and proficiency, and family well-being. Parents from 587 families completed an online survey for 1051 children. Data were analysed using ordinal logistic regression. Our results showed that for most children, there were no changes in language use, proficiency or well-being. When there were changes, these were more likely for (families with) preschool children. Using the heritage language for homeschooling (some or all of the time) did not have a negative impact on Dutch language proficiency, but it did have a positive impact on the heritage language proficiency.

On the Relation Between Cross-Linguistic Influence, Between-Language Priming and Language Proficiency: Priming of Ungrammatical Adjective Placement in Bilingual Spanish-Dutch and French-Dutch Children.

After hearing a structure in one language, bilinguals are more likely to produce the same structure in their other language. Such between-language priming is often interpreted as evidence for shared syntactic representations between a bilingual's two languages and is positively related to proficiency. Recently, shared syntactic structures and structural priming have been invoked to explain cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children. This paper examines the relation between cross-linguistic influence, between-language priming and language proficiency. Almost all studies on between-language priming have focussed on grammatical structures. However, cross-linguistic influence has also been found to result in ungrammatical structures. In this study, we investigated whether ungrammatical adjective placement can be primed from a Germanic language to a Romance language and vice versa, and how to best account for any such priming. Furthermore, we examined the role of proficiency in explaining priming effects and whether this fits with an error-based learning account. Our results show that it is possible to prime ungrammatical structures, that this is lexically constrained, and that it is more likely to occur at lower levels of proficiency. We argue that the same mechanisms underlying grammatical priming can also explain our findings of ungrammatical priming.

So many variables, but what causes what?

Paradis' keynote article provides a comprehensive overview of factors influencing bilingual children's dual language abilities. It includes the 'usual suspects', such as input quantity, and also highlights areas requiring further investigation, such as cognitive abilities. As such, it will no doubt serve as a valuable basis for the field as we move forward. Paradis quite rightly points out that whilst some of these factors may be unidirectionally related to language abilities, suggesting causality, for many others such relations are bi- or multidirectional and as such, caution is required in interpreting them. In order to pinpoint the nature and direction of these relations (currently absent from Figure 1 in the keynote), more complex analytic techniques are needed, as Paradis herself notes: "The relations among attitudes/identity, input and interaction, and perhaps social adjustment and wellbeing, are likely to be complex; therefore, more complex analytic techniques are needed to understand the path(s) between family attitudes about the HL on one hand, and children's HL outcomes on the other." (Paradis, 2023: 19). In this commentary, we provide an illustration of how the complex relationships between the variables discussed in Paradis's keynote article could be conceptualised within a causal inference approach. We offer a modest starting point by summarising key features of causal inference modelling and by illustrating how it might help us better understand what causes what.

Cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous and early sequential bilingual children: a meta-analysis.

Although cross-linguistic influence at the level of morphosyntax is one of the most intensively studied topics in child bilingualism, the circumstances under which it occurs remain unclear. In this meta-analysis, we measured the effect size of cross-linguistic influence and systematically assessed its predictors in 750 simultaneous and early sequential bilingual children in 17 unique language combinations across 26 experimental studies. We found a significant small to moderate average effect size of cross-linguistic influence, indicating that cross-linguistic influence is part and parcel of bilingual development. Language dominance, operationalized as societal language, was a significant predictor of cross-linguistic influence, whereas surface overlap, language domain and age were not. Perhaps an even more important finding was that definitions and operationalisations of cross-linguistic influence and its predictors varied considerably between studies. This could explain the absence of a comprehensive theory in the field. To solve this issue, we argue for a more uniform method of studying cross-linguistic influence.

Testing the validity of the Cross-Linguistic Lexical Task as a measure of language proficiency in bilingual children.

The Cross-linguistic Lexical Task (CLT; Haman, Luniewska & Pomiechowska, 2015) is a vocabulary task designed to enable cross-linguistic comparisons both across and within (bilingual) children. In this paper we assessed the validity of the CLT as a measure of language proficiency in bilingual children, by determining the extent to which (i) age-matched, monolingual Spanish-speaking and Dutch-speaking children obtained similar scores, (ii) the CLT correlated with other measures of language proficiency in monolingual and bilingual children, and (iii) whether the factors underlying the CLT's construction, i.e., target words' estimated Age of Acquisition and Complexity Index, were predictive of children's scores. Our results showed that, while the CLT correlated with other measures and is therefore a valid means of tapping into language proficiency, caution is required when using it to compare children's language proficiency cross-linguistically, as scores for Dutch-speaking and Spanish-speaking monolinguals sometimes differed.

Perception of English phonetic contrasts by Dutch children: How bilingual are early-English learners?

The aim of this study was to investigate whether early-English education benefits the perception of English phonetic contrasts that are known to be perceptually confusable for Dutch native speakers, comparing Dutch pupils who were enrolled in an early-English programme at school from the age of four with pupils in a mainstream programme with English instruction from the age of 11, and English-Dutch early bilingual children. Children were 4-5-year-olds (start of primary school), 8-9-year-olds, or 11-12-year-olds (end of primary school). Children were tested on four contrasts that varied in difficulty: /b/-/s/ (easy), /k/-/É¡/ (intermediate), /f/-/θ/ (difficult), /ɛ/-/æ/ (very difficult). Bilingual children outperformed the two other groups on all contrasts except /b/-/s/. Early-English pupils did not outperform mainstream pupils on any of the contrasts. This shows that early-English education as it is currently implemented is not beneficial for pupils' perception of non-native contrasts.

Experiential Measures Can Be Used as a Proxy for Language Dominance in Bilingual Language Acquisition Research.

Language dominance is a multidimensional construct comprising several distinct yet interrelated components, including language proficiency, exposure and use. The exact relation between these components remains unclear. Several studies have observed a (non-linear) relationship between bilingual children's amount of exposure and absolute proficiency in each language, but our understanding of the relationship between language exposure and use and relative proficiency is limited. To address this question, we examined whether experiential-based measures of language dominance, operationalised here in the narrow sense of relative language proficiency, can provide an efficient alternative to the more labor-intensive performance-based measures often used in the literature. In earlier work, Unsworth (a) examined the relationship between relative proficiency and language exposure and use in a group of English-Dutch bilingual preschool children residing in the Netherlands. This study expands these findings by examining Dutch-English preschool children of the same age residing in the United Kingdom in order to cover the full dominance continuum. Participants were 35 simultaneous bilingual children (2;0-5;0) exposed to English and Dutch, 20 resident in the Netherlands and 15 in the United Kingdom. Relative amount of language exposure and use were estimated using a parental questionnaire. To obtain performance-based measures of language proficiency, children's spontaneous speech was recorded during a half-hour play session in each language. The transcribed data were used to derive MLU (words), average length of the longest five utterances, the number of different verb and noun types. Single word vocabulary comprehension was assessed using standardized tests in both languages. Following Yip and Matthews (2006), relative proficiency was operationalised using differentials. In line with Unsworth (2016a), English-dominant children typically had less than approx. 35% exposure to Dutch and used Dutch less than approximately 30% of the time. Curve-fitting analyses revealed that non-linear models best fit the data. Logistic regression analyses showed that both exposure and use were good predictors of dominance group membership assigned using the same approach as Unsworth (2016a), that is, using SDs. Dominance groups derived independently using cluster analyses overlapped with the groups derived using SDs, confirming that relative amount of exposure and use can be used as a proxy for language dominance.

Language balance and switching ability in children acquiring English as a second language.

This study investigated whether relative lexical proficiency in Dutch and English in child second language (L2) learners is related to executive functioning. Participants were Dutch primary school pupils of three different age groups (4-5, 8-9, and 11-12 years) who either were enrolled in an early-English schooling program or were age-matched controls not on that early-English program. Participants performed tasks that measured switching, inhibition, and working memory. Early-English program pupils had greater knowledge of English vocabulary and more balanced Dutch-English lexicons. In both groups, lexical balance, a ratio measure obtained by dividing vocabulary scores in English by those in Dutch, was related to switching but not to inhibition or working memory performance. These results show that for children who are learning an L2 in an instructional setting, and for whom managing two languages is not yet an automatized process, language balance may be more important than L2 proficiency in influencing the relation between childhood bilingualism and switching abilities.

Processing grammatical gender in Dutch: Evidence from eye movements.

Previous research has demonstrated that grammatical gender in Dutch is typically acquired late. Most of this work used production data only, and consequently children's knowledge of Dutch gender may have been underestimated. In this study, therefore, we examined whether 49 4- to 7-year-old Dutch-speaking children (and 19 adult controls) were able to use gender marking in the article preceding the object label during online sentence processing to (a) anticipate the upcoming object label or to (b) facilitate the processing of that label as it is presented. In addition, we investigated whether children's online processing and production of gender marking on articles were related. In an eye-tracking task, participants were presented with sentences and visual displays with two objects, representing nouns of either the same gender (uninformative) or different genders (informative). Children were divided into a non-targetlike group and a targetlike group on the basis of their scores for neuter nouns in the production task. Our analyses examined whether participants could use gender marking anticipatorily (i.e., before the onset of the noun) and facilitatively (i.e., from noun onset). Results showed that Dutch-speaking adults and children who were successful in production used gender marking anticipatorily. However, children who did not systematically produce gender-marked articles used gender marking only facilitatively. These findings reveal that successful online comprehension may in part be possible before targetlike production is completely in place, but at the same time targetlike production may be a trigger for online comprehension to be completely successful.

Early child L2 acquisition: Age or input effects? Neither, or both?

This paper explores whether there is evidence for age and/or input effects in child L2 acquisition across three different linguistic domains, namely morphosyntax, vocabulary, and syntax-semantics. More specifically, it compares data from English-speaking children whose age of onset to L2 Dutch was between one and three years with data from children whose age of onset was between four and seven years in their acquisition of verb morphology, verb placement, vocabulary, and direct object scrambling. The main findings were that there were no significant differences between the two groups in any of these areas and, with the exception of scrambling, current amount of exposure was the only factor significantly related to children's scores. The paper discusses the theoretical significance of these findings with respect to the role of input in the language acquisition process and the claim that there is a critical period ending within (early) childhood.