[PS-1.28] Distributional Properties of Bilingual Child-Directed Speech

Onnis, L. 1 & Li, Y. 1, 2

1 Nanyang Technological University Singapore
2 University of Manchester

The quantity, quality, and diversity of child-directed speech (CDS) in monolingual environments have a strong influence on early linguistic development. Properties of bilingual input are less known. Here we asked whether bilingualism moderates parents' spontaneous use of lexical and syntactic partial repetitions. For example, in 'Apples are red, and apples are tasty', the sequence 'apples are' repeats within a short time frame. These partial repetitions contain useful latent distributional information about the building blocks of language. We recorded and transcribed bilingual mothers' (n=91) narration from a wordless picture book. Two dependent variables captured parental partial repetitions: (a) Proportion and (b) lexical diversity (LD) of repeated words. Mixed-effects regression analyses for each dependent measure (P-rep and LD) included fixed factors (maternal degree bilingualism; maternal level of education; child age) and all two-way interactions thereof, and random intercepts for subjects.

RESULTS. More bilingually balanced mothers produced significantly more partial repetitions compared to more monolingual parents, while preserving the same degree of lexical richness. Because partial repetitions are predictive of children's lexical and grammatical structures, our results suggest that bilingually balanced parents maximize their verbal communication to their child. An ongoing study is investigating metalinguistic knowledge as the source of the effect found.