Impact of language exposure on the early language development of Cantonese-English bilinguals

Abstract

The present study explores the impact of amount of language exposure on the early language development of Cantonese-English bilingual children in the area of vocabulary acquisition and phonological development. Ten Cantonese monolingual and ten Cantonese-English bilingual children aged 22-32 months participated in this study. The MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory in English and Cantonese (CDI; Fenson, 2007; Tardif et al., 2002), an adapted version of speech sound assessment on Cantonese and English (Cheung, Ng & To, 2006; Dodd et al., 2002) alongside a language exposure questionnaire (Cattani et al., 2014) were completed with the participants. The results suggested that with 60% or more of Cantonese exposure, there are no significant quantitative differences in vocabulary size and phonological accuracy of Cantonese between Cantonese-English bilinguals and Cantonese monolinguals. However, qualitative differences were observed in the vocabulary composition and phonological development of Cantonese-English bilinguals with a significantly higher noun-to-noun-and-verb ratio and a higher occurrence of atypical or delayed errors patterns suggesting possible cross-linguistic transfer between the two languages in the early stage of language development. Therefore, a detailed case history on the amount of language exposure that Cantonese-English bilingual children receive on each language should be obtained when assessing Cantonese-English speaking bilingual children.