Comparing Language Exposure Measures in Dual Language Contexts
Brandon Zuel − Communication Disorders & Sciences
Co Presenter(s): Melanie Bethancourt
Faculty Mentor(s): Stephanie De Anda, Lauren Cycyk
Poster 130
Research Area: Social Science
Parent report is a common method for quantifying language exposure in bilingual children however it is not always reliable. A less studied method is analyzing real-world language input. The present study seeks to fill the gap of quantifying language exposure by examining the amount of language input in each language through real-world audio recording in the everyday lives of bilingual toddlers. This preliminary study presents data on 2 participants from Spanish-speaking homes (Participant A: 18;0, male; Participant B: 18;25, female). Audio recordings were captured using the Language Environment Analysis device (Ford, Baer, Xu, Yapanel & Gray, 2009). 16 hours of language input data were collected over three days. The data was then analyzed in 5-minute increments to quantify exposure to English and Spanish. We calculated exposure during periods when the child had the highest amount of (a) adult words in the environment, (b) linguistically meaningful interactions, and (c) child-directed speech. Results indicated that full-day audio recordings and all discrete segments demonstrated comparable calculations of language exposure. That is, language exposure captured in the three afromentioned methods demonstrated similar measurements, and these mirrored parent estimates as well. Together these results show that several methods of calculating language exposure within language samples yield relatively similar estimates. However, this is based on two participants with relatively stable exposure to Spanish. We plan to provide data on an additional 6 participants at the time of the poster presentation to ask whether children with more exposure to English demonstrate a similar pattern of results.