Input quality

A number of recent bilingualism studies attempt to determine the effect of some of the many variables affecting input quality on language acquisition. Some determinants of input quality are the directness versus indirectness of the input (cf. Section 3.2 for an example of a trilingualism study investigating these variables), the quantity and/or quality of television exposure, the frequency of a structure in the input and variance in the form and use of morphosyntactic structures in the child’s linguistic environment (due to contact features or attrition effects in the speech of speakers residing in a majority language context, different levels of proficiency in the speech of non-native speakers, dialectal forms, etc.; cf. Paradis, 2011b:68).

As far as quantity of television exposure in infancy is concerned, there is not yet any consensus on whether it negatively affects language acquisition or not (for an overview of studies on this topic, cf. Hudon, Fennell, & Hoftyzer, 2013). However, quality of television input, i.e. the content of the television programs, does seem to play a definitive role in language acquisition and cognitive development. Researchers are increasingly finding that television exposure of poor quality negatively affects cognitive development in young children (cf., for example, Barr, Lauricella, Zack, & Calvert, 2010; Linebarger & Walker, 2005; Okuma & Tanimura, 2009). In terms of linguistic development, Linebarger and Walker (2005) report higher language skills in 30-month-old children who watch television programs that imitate “real-world learning” (by using characters that address the viewer, allowing time for a response from the viewer and employing simple narrative structures) and lower language skills in children who watch programs with complex stimuli and looser narrative structures. Similarly, Okuma and Tanimura (2009) noted protracted linguistic development in the case of 18-month-olds exposed to television content that does not inspire parent-infant interaction, for example realistic animation and programs with fast scene changes.

57 Additionally, researchers have begun to suspect that it is not only the content of television programs or the quantity thereof per se that can cause developmental delays, but also the fact that television viewing, and even overhearing background television intended for older viewers, discourages child-parent interaction (Barr et al., 2010; Christakis et al., 2009; Kirkorian, Pempek, Murphy, Schmidt, & Anderson, 2009; Schmidt, Pempek, Kirkorian, Lund, & Anderson, 2008).

For this reason, Hudon et al. (2013) created a comprehensive television habits questionnaire for both monolingual and bilingual populations, and used it to investigate the relationship between television exposure and vocabulary size in English monolingual, French monolingual and English-French bilingual infants and toddlers. The suitability of this questionnaire for testing bilingual populations is a valuable contribution as dual language acquisition relies heavily on social interaction in both languages, which is reduced by television viewing due to attention being drawn away from real-life interlocutors (Hudon et al., 2013:247). For the purposes of testing productive vocabulary size in their monolingual and bilingual participants, Hudon et al. (2013) employed the “Words and Sentences” version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory, both the American English and French Canadian equivalents (Fenson et al., 1993). On the one hand, results support the findings of Schmidt, Rich, Rifas-Schiman, Oken and Taveras (2009) and Zimmerman, Christakis and Meltzoff (2007) in indicating no effect of quantity of television exposure on vocabulary size (Hudon et al., 2013:252). Quality of input, on the other hand, did affect vocabulary size: vocabulary scores were lower in children who started watching television from a young age when their comprehension abilities were still low, who regularly watched television on their own, and who were often exposed to background television and/or non- child-directed programming (Hudon et al., 2013:252).

Another factor relating to the quality of linguistic input that has received some research attention is contact-variety input, i.e. adult L1 input that contains inherent non-native features (“attrition effects”) resulting from CLI in cases where the speaker has received extensive L2 exposure in an L2 majority environment (Hauser-Grüdl, Arencibia Guerra, Witzmann, Leray, & Müller, 2010:2638; Paradis, 2011b:374). Similar to cases where children receive input from non-native speakers with differing proficiency levels and from speakers of a specific

58 dialect, it is important to take the possibility of contact-variety input into consideration when comparing bilinguals to monolinguals: variance in the forms and use of structures in the input may influence a bilingual learner’s underlying linguistic representation, processing and use of that structure, which could lead to non-convergence with monolingual norms (Paradis, 2011b:68). These considerations are also important when attempting to determine whether transfer has occurred between a learner’s two linguistic systems, or whether what appears to be CLI is simply a reflection of aspects of the learner’s input.

One example of a study in which possible CLI between an individual’s two languages could not be disentangled from a possible reflection of contact-variety input is that by Paradis and Navarro (2003), which reports on the use of null-subjects by an English-Spanish bilingual toddler. The participant was found to produce more redundant overt subjects in Spanish, a null-subject language, than monolingual Spanish-speakers of the same age. Whereas this could have been a result of CLI from English, a non-null subject language requiring overt subjects, evidence of an overuse of redundant overt subjects was also found in the input she was exposed to, especially that from her mother (Paradis, 2011b:388).