Barr, R. , Rusnak, S. , Rocha Hidalgo, J. , Lui, M. & Strautman, N.
Georgetown University
Joint book reading occurs daily and predicts linguistic outcomes (e.g., Raikes et al., 2006) but has not been closely examined with bilingual infants. Fifty-seven bilingual 18- and 24-month-olds (25 girls) in the United States participated in a 5-minute picture-book reading (words occluded) task. Caregivers were instructed to read to infants in the language that they would typically use when reading. Based on the Language Exposure Questionnaire (Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 2001) bilingual infants were defined as those who had been exposed to two languages on a daily basis from birth and had exposure to a second language 20-50% of the time; L2 varied with 12 different languages. Surprisingly, 59.3% of readers chose to read in English. Correlations revealed for those that did read in a different language, the caregiver was more likely to report that the infant preferred other languages over English and was exposed to English less. Despite the fact that many bilingual parents report regular language mixing with their children (Byers-Heinlein, 2012) only 11.1% of book reading sessions included any language mixing. Despite a fairly well accepted definition of bilinguals, these findings suggest that categorical definitions of bilingualism fail to capture great variation within bilingual infants.