Bulgarelli Federica, Potter Christine E
Department of Psychology, University at Buffalo - SUNY, Buffalo, NY, USA.
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Multilingua (Berl). 2023 Jun 19;43(2):191-212. doi: 10.1515/multi-2023-0003. eCollection 2024 Mar.
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, extensive lockdowns interrupted daily routines, including childcare. We asked whether these interruptions, and the inevitable changes in the people with whom children spent their waking hours, caused changes in the languages that children heard. We retrospectively queried parents of young children (0-4 years) in the US about childcare arrangements and exposure to English and non-English languages at four timepoints from February 2020 to September 2021. Despite discontinuity in childcare arrangements, we found that children's exposure to English versus other languages remained relatively stable. We also identified demographic variables (child age at pandemic onset, parental proficiency in a non-English language) that consistently predicted exposure to non-English languages. Thus, multilingually-exposed children in this population did not appear to significantly gain or lose the opportunity to hear non-English languages overall. These results provide insight into the experiences of this unique cohort and inform our understanding of how language development can be shaped by complex environmental systems.
在新冠疫情早期，广泛的封锁措施打乱了日常生活，包括儿童保育。我们想知道这些干扰，以及孩子醒着时与之相处的人的必然变化，是否导致孩子听到的语言发生了变化。我们回顾性地询问了美国幼儿（0至4岁）的父母在2020年2月至2021年9月这四个时间点的儿童保育安排以及他们接触英语和非英语的情况。尽管儿童保育安排存在间断，但我们发现孩子接触英语与其他语言的情况相对保持稳定。我们还确定了一些人口统计学变量（疫情开始时孩子的年龄、父母对非英语语言的熟练程度），这些变量始终能够预测孩子对非英语语言的接触情况。因此，总体而言，这一群体中接触多种语言的孩子似乎并没有明显增加或减少听到非英语语言的机会。这些结果为了解这一独特群体的经历提供了见解，并增进了我们对复杂环境系统如何塑造语言发展的理解。
