GL Experiences

Infant Development Lab | Language Acquisition Research 

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Immigration is a phenomenon that has existed in the United States since its establishment. A large number of the immigrants found in Miami come from Spanish-speaking countries. Most of the children in Miami specially those living in immigrant households, are exposed to Spanish at home or school sometime throughout their lives. For children learning to speak English, this exposure to a foreign language may affect their acquisition and vocabulary development. It is important to understand first, the roles parents play in language acquisition of children and second how the introduction of Spanish as a second language may affect their development of the English language. 

Previous research on this topic shows that exposure to greater quantity and quality (i.e. diversity, complexity) of child-directed speech supports greater vocabulary acquisition in infants in monolingual language environments.  Parents promote infant vocabulary development by their language input, including using a greater number and wider variety of words. Given the increased complexity of studying vocabulary development in bilingual children, we focused our investigation on children whose family’s dominant language is English, with varying degrees of exposure to Spanish. The objective of my project was to assess the role of the quality and quantity of child-directed speech exposure at 12 months of age in predicting English vocabulary development at 24 months of age. We also assessed the effects of varying degrees of exposure to Spanish on English vocabulary at 24 months. Data from an ongoing longitudinal study in the Infant Development lab at FIU was analyzed. It provided videotaped parent-child interactions consisting of an 8-minute semi-structured play episode. Parent speech was transcribed, and the quantity (number of words spoken per minute) and quality (number of different words per minute and mean length utterance) of parent vocabulary was measured when their children were 12 months of age. At 24 months of age, parents completed the Mac-Arthur Bates Communicative Development Inventory to obtain a measure of child complexity and expressive vocabulary (words understood and said). Results contributed to our understanding of the developmental pathways from early parent language input to later language development and the role of exposure to Spanish as a second language. Please click on the first picture to download the presentation and learn more about this research.