Author(s): Quirk E; Brouillard M; Ahooja A; Ballinger S; Polka L; Byers-Heinlein K; Kircher R;

Many parents express concerns for their children's multilingual development, yet little is known about the nature and strength of these concerns - especially among parents in multilingual societies. This pre-registered, questionnaire-based study addresses this gap by examining the concerns of 821 Quebec-based parents raising infants and toddlers aged ...

Article GUID: 39055771

Author(s): Ruan Y; Byers-Heinlein K; Orena AJ; Polka L;

Language mixing is a common feature of many bilingually-raised children's input. Yet how it is related to their language development remains an open question. The current study investigated mixed-language input indexed by observed (30-second segment) counts and proportions in day-long recordings as well as parent-reported scores, in relation to infant ...

Article GUID: 38187471

Author(s): Kircher R; Quirk E; Brouillard M; Ahooja A; Ballinger S; Polka L; Byers-Heinlein K;

This is the first large-scale, quantitative study of the evaluative dimensions and potential predictors of Quebec-based parents' attitudes towards childhood multilingualism. Such attitudes are assumed to constitute a determinant of parental language choices, and thereby influence children's multilingual development. The newly-developed Attitudes t ...

Article GUID: 36051630

Author(s): Kremin LV; Alves J; Orena AJ; Polka L; Byers-Heinlein K;

Code-switching is a common phenomenon in bilingual communities, but little is known about bilingual parents' code-switching when speaking to their infants. In a pre-registered study, we identified instances of code-switching in day-long at-home audio recordings of 21 French-English bilingual families in Montreal, Canada, who provided recordings when t ...

Article GUID: 34006344

Author(s): Orena AJ; Byers-Heinlein K; Polka L;

Examining how bilingual infants experience their dual language input is important for understanding bilingual language acquisition. To assess these language experiences, researchers typically conduct language interviews with caregivers. However, little is known about the reliability of these parent reports in describing how bilingual children actually exp ...

Article GUID: 31505096

Author(s): Orena AJ; Byers-Heinlein K; Polka L;

Purpose This study examined the utility of the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) recording system for investigating the language input to bilingual infants. Method Twenty-one French-English bilingual families with a 10-month-old infant participated in this study. Using the LENA recording system, each family contributed 3 full days of recordings within ...

Article GUID: 31194915