Families' mealtime talk has significant implications for children's language development. This study investigated five middle-class Australian Chinese families that differ in their lifestyles and meal routines. It aims to explore: (1) the nature of the Chinese parents' language use in interactions with children at mealtime; and (2) the factors…

This study explored the patterns and predictors of code-switching (CS) in Singapore preschoolers by analyzing the data elicited from an existing early childhood corpus. Altogether 943 cases of CS produced by 111 children aged 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, 5;6, respectively, were analyzed. The results indicated that: (1) 'insertion', 'intersentential', and…

Deaf children whose hearing losses prevent them from accessing spoken language and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign language develop gesture systems, called "homesigns", which have many of the properties of natural language--the so-called resilient properties of language. We explored the resilience of structure built…

Contexts of limited input such as trilingual families where a language is not spoken in the wider community but only by a reduced number of speakers in the home provide a unique opportunity to examine closely the relationship between a child's input and what she learns to say. Barnes reported on the relationship between maternal input and a…

To express object transfer, Cantonese-speakers use a "ditransitive" ([V-R-T] or [V-T-R] where V = Verb, T = Theme, R = Recipient), or a more complex prepositional/serial-verb (P/SV) construction. Clausal elements in Cantonese datives can be optional (resulting in "full" versus "non-full" forms) or appear in variant…

The father's role in children's L1 maintenance and L2 learning is a relatively unexplored area. This study considers the L1 and L2 proficiency of 30 Korean-English late bilinguals who immigrated to New Zealand during their adolescence and how their L1 and L2 proficiency is influenced by the language use of family members. Data were collected…

This study examined linguistic patterns in the Jewish ultra-Orthodox community in Israel, a group that has rarely been studied from a sociolinguistic perspective. Participants were 92 girls, 10-12 years old, who attend a school where Yiddish is the language of instruction and Hebrew, Israel's official language, is studied only in religious…

Shared book reading in families is strongly linked with successful school literacy and thus with identity, belonging and participation in literate societies. From an "emergent" perspective, literacy is recognised as beginning from birth. However, despite exceptions such as research into the UK program, "Bookstart", most…

Finds important differences between Quebecois and French mothers: the Quebecois mothers spoke more than French mothers and produced a greater number of assertive and expressive speech acts than the French mothers. Shows that speech used in both of these cultural groups varies according to the mother's child-rearing style, with coercive mothers…

Explores the possibility that the early predominance of infinitival forms in children acquiring Dutch as their first language is related to patterns in the language input. Analyzed a corpus of utterances addressed by two Dutch-speaking mothers to their 2- and 3-year-old sons. Root infinitive utterances amounted to 10%, and auxiliary-plus…

A study investigated the patterns of question use in Mandarin Chinese-speaking parents' and caregivers' interactions with children, and how they characterize social class differences. Subjects were 10 children, aged 21-23 months, and their families, selected from immunization records in Beijing, China. Parents were all native speakers of Mandarin…

A study of language use of bilingual Alsatian youth, 15-18 years old, showed French acculturation to be growing, although German dialectal tendencies persist. Socioeconomic status and the role of recent generations in this process are considered. (MSE)

This paper presents an exploratory study, using an ethnographic approach, of linguistically and ethnically diverse parents interacting with their children. Subjects included three Persian-speaking families, three Chaldeans, and three Euro-American families; children were aged 4-5 years. Goals were to understand cross cultural communication,…

Patterns of language maintenance among immigrants have been researched widely, and lie at the core of daily life for immigrant families. The present study reports on a questionnaire developed to assess various aspects of language maintenance, focusing on parent-child communication. Parents and children of 307 immigrant families living in Sydney,…

Conversations between mothers and children from three different cultural groups were analyzed to determine culturally preferred narrative elicitation patterns. The three groups included Japanese-speaking mother-child pairs living in Japan, Japanese-speaking, mother-child pairs living in the United States, and English-speaking Canadian mother-child…